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Content THE INFLUENCE OF RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY ON STEPHEN HAWES the Faculty of the Department of English University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy A. Thesis Presented to by Mildred Anderson April 1936 UMI Number: DP22980 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproductipn is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22980 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Anri Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 This thesis, written under the direction of the candidate’s Faculty Committee and approved by all its members, has been presented to and ac cepted by the Council on Graduate Study and Research in partial fulfillm ent of the require ments for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY' ■etary Dean £ , a t e June a 1936 Faculty Committee Chairman PREFACE Stephen Hawes. Is generally considered to be a repre sentative of a tradition that was dead even when he wrote, little touched by the new ideas of the Renaissance world. The thesis of this study is that Hawes was aware of many of these new ideas, and that Renaissance philosophy had a not able influence upon his poetry. The conclusions are based on a consideration of The Example of Virtue, The Pastime of Pleasure, and ’ ’The Conversion of Swearers’ *. It is well at the beginning to list a few of the hindrances unto perfection. A complete study of Hawes has not been possible because two of the poems, wThe Joyful Meditation” and ’ ’The Consolation of hovers”, are not avail able. Then, the problem requires knowledge not only of the Renaissance but of all prior thought, and one cannot be thoroughly competent in so broad a field. The problem of the relation of Hawes and his fellows to Ficino's Platonism is a matter for a thesis In itself, a subject of which I have touched only the margins. The period, from the liter ary, philosophical, and scholastic points of view, is not well documented, and much of the pertinent data is lost or unrecorded. I myself probably have a Protestant bias in dealing with the early reformative tendencies. These limit ations should be remembered, and some allowance should be made for them in the eonelnsion. I am indebted to the Huntington Library for making available to me early editions of The Example of Yirtue and "The Conversion of Swearers,” as well as many rare sources and reference books* I am grateful to Drs. Allison Saw, John D. Gooke, Ealph T. Flewelling, and especially to Dr. H* W. Hill, for patient and detailed criticism, without which the imperfections of this study would be much greater than they are. TABLE OP CONTENTS Part Page I LIFE OP STEPHEN HAWES...............................1 I..........EARLY LIFE.................................. 1 Biographical facts ........... 1 Contemporary grammar schools . . . • • . • • • 2 Contemporary conservative religion ........... 10 Church organization......................10 Church doctrine ....................... 13 Popular 14 Scholastic . . . . . . . . ......... ...17 II OXFORD................ 25 Biographical facts •• ......... .......25 Surviving medieval curriculum ............... 27 Humanism ...... ...................... ..30 In Italy.......................................30 In England ..............................34 III LONDON......................... - ...................47 . Biographical facts ... .... ............. 47 Christian humanism • ............... .....54 At Oxford ..... ........................ 54 In London ................................... 59 II WORKS OF HAWES .......................... .. 71 I THE EXAMPLE OF VIRTUE.......................... 71 Publication .......... 71 Summary ..... ............................ 72 Vi Part Page II WORKS OP HAWES (continued) Interpretation of allegory . . ................79 Literary sources ...................... 81 Philosophical sources ..*... ........... 83 . II THE PASTIME OP PLEASURE...........................93 Publication............. 93 Literary sources............... . . .............94 Summary ............. 95 Interpretation of allegory .... 104 Philosophical sources . . . .................. 105 III CONVERSION OP SWEARERS........................... 113 Publication . . . 113 Summary.............................. 114 Sources ............. 119 III THE RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE............. 123 I THE ARISTOTELIAN PROBLEM.........................123 History of the t e x t • • • • . . . . 124 Aristotelianism in Hawes ................... 127 Rhetoric and poetics ...............127 Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Ethics ........................ ... .... 149 II PLATONISM ........................................ 172 Platonic tradition . .. .... 172 Platonism in Hawes •••••• ............... 178 VI i Part Page III THE RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE (continued) Justification of poetry ......... . . . . . 178 Justice . . . . . . . . . . ............... 179 Love and .beauty............. 180 The l o v e .......... 180 The beloved................................ 196 The w a y ............. 204 The two worlds ................. . 209 III ' REFORMATION IDEAS ..............................215 In The Example and The Pastime ....... 216 In The Conversion of Swearers . ............ 217 Traditional religion ...................... 217 Reformation ideas . . ..... ........... 228 IV RENAISSANCE POINTS OF V I E W ..................... 244 Active life 244 The well-rounded life................... 247 Denial of ascetism............................251 Nationalism............................ 255 Biographical parallels .. ................. 254 IV CONCLUSION..................................... . 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................280 APPENDIX A. , Biographical.material from.Bale . , . . . . 294 APPENDIX B. Biographical material from Wood ...... 297 PART I - LIFE OF STEPHEN HAWES CHAPTER I . EARLY LIFE The sources Tor the facts known about Stephen Hawes* life are few and poor* There are two early biographical fragments: Bishop Bale's Scriptorum Illustrium Maiorun Bry- tanniae, 1557, and Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxoniensis, 1691-2* The documents of the Records Office supply a few points* Be sides these there are the introductions and colophons to the poems as contemporary evidence* The name of Hawes, variously spelled, appears fre quently in XVth Century records, in London and the prov inces but it does not seem to be possible to fix upon definite ancestry for Stephen Hawes* Bale, with his usual compliments, believes him to come from an illustrious family but suggests nothing more specific. Wood says he was ori ginally descended nfr.om the Hawes of Hawes in the Bushes, in ■^The Calendar of Patent Rolls, The Calendar of the Fine Rolls, and The Calendar of the Inquisition and other Analogous Documents, preserved in the Public Records Office (published for his Majesty's Stationer, in 1801, 1933, and 1898, respectively) and the Subsidy Returns of 1524, called Suffolk, 1524, London, 1910, name about a score in London, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent, Essex, and elsewhere. Especially prominent are the names John, Christopher, and Thomas* the county of Suffolk."2 The conjecture that he was born in Suffolk is borne out by what was probably his will, probated in Aldborough in 1525, and by the testimony of the tax rolls of 1524.® There is no external evidence regarding the date of his birth, but 1475 is usually accepted.^ it should be remembered, however, that this date is little more than a guess. Nothing is known, apparently, about his schooling before he reached Oxford. He may have gone to a grammar school in Suffolk, or he may have gone to Oxford to a pre paratory school attached to the university. There were 2The text of the biographies of Bale and Wood are in the Appendix. ^Suffolk, 1524, op. cit., p. 481, lists Stephen Hawes among the natives of Suffolk. ^However, this date, as John M. Berdan, in Early Tu dor Poetry, (1485-1557), New York, 1920, points out is com puted upon an error. In The Pastime of Pleasure, 11 3055-4, appear these verses: I thought me past all chyldly ygnoraunce The xxj yere of my yonge flouerynge age. In the 1555 edition that age was put at xxxi, and since this was the edition reprinted by the Percy Society and long the only one in general use, every one concluded that that was the right reading. On this basis, assuming that the poet was speaking realistically of himself, people concluded that in 1506 the poet was thirty-one years old, and that he was bom in 1475. Even setting aside the typographical error of the 1555 edition regarding the poet’s age, one still has no justification for taking the lines to refer to the poet’s age and not the hero’s. The rest of the poem is not taken to be autobiographical. In The Example of Virtue, (1504) 1 276, in a somewhat parallel situation, the hero is said to be forty. Still, 1475 Is customarily accepted as the date of his birth, and indeed it fits fairly well with the rest of his life. g nine grammar schools in existence in Suffolk before 1500. Of the nine, Dunwich seems not to have been open in the XVth Century; Stokes by Clare, Clare, and Beccles are little men tioned; and Sudbury was founded too late to have been open to Hawes. Thetford and Long Melford leave records of activ ity in the last two decades of the century, The most im portant and most frequently mentioned of the Suffolk schools are Bury St. Edmund*3 and Ipswich. The first was the school of Lydgate, both as school boy and monk; but it is not neces sary to infer any school tradition as the basis for Hawes* admiration for him, since it was a well-established literary fashion to revere Lydgate along with Chaucer and Gower. It had a contlnous existence from the times of Athelstan; and there are records of gifts at the end of the XVth and begin ning of the XVIth Centuries, but it was not of first impor tance. Although it is only a guess, it is a possibility that, since Hawes was to go to the university and had appar- ^Victoria History of the County of Suffolk, edited by William Page, London, Archibald Constable and 60., Ltd., 1907, II; 303-37 and 339-41. Dunwich was in existence be fore the Conquest, Thetford was established 1075, Bury St. Edmund*s under Athelstan (Nicholas Carlisle, Concise Descrip tion of Endowed English Grammar Schools In England and Wales, London, 18l8, II; 5l$, says it was begun as a monastery school in 1198.) Ipswich is first mentioned in 1476-7, Bec cles, 1396, Stokes by Clare, 1414, Clare, 1445-6, Long Mel ford, 1484, and Sudbury, 1491. 4 ently come from a good family,® he went to the good and newly- established school at Ipswich. Wolsey was born at Ipswich and may have gone to school there.^ If the two had gone to Ipswich grammar school they might have been school mates, be cause they were about the same age. The grammar school at Ipswich was first mentioned in an entry in corporation minutes of 1477, under the Bishop of Q Norwich. In 1482 It was endowed with lands by Richard Felaw, and became thereafter a free school to all with Incomes be low twenty shillings or property below twenty pounds.9 Under the terms of the incorporation of that year ’ ‘every Burgess Inhabitant should pay to the Master of the Grammar School lO for a boy, 8 d. per quarter and no more," but this order was apparently superseded by the endowment. The master in 1488 was probably (Master Thomas) Heede, B. A. and M. A., ®Beyond the word of Bale is the evidence supplied by the position Hawes later assumed at court. *7 'Victoria History, op. cit., p. 328, assumed him to have been a student there. However, he 3peaks of Ipswich as "meura natale solum,” in writing to Clement VII. (Thelner, Vetera Monumenta, p. 554B), quoted by A. F. Pollard, Wol3ey, frondon, 19i29, p. 12, n. 1. ^Carlisle, op. cit., p. 521; Victoria History, op. cit., II: 325-6. 9Ibid., p. 327 ^ • °Ibid., p. 326; Carlisle, p. 521; full text of char ters of 14'77 and 1482 in A. F. Leach, Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909, Cambridge, 1911, p. 423. wlio had been at Cambridge in 1487-9 and 1481-2.^*- The gover ning body to carry out the terms of Felaw's will was composed of the bailiffs of the town together with Felaw's executors. The school was, therefore, a type of the new secular schools, a Merchant's School controlled primarily by the townspeople and not by the church, with a secular master well-trained at the university. It is probably only a pleasant fiction to suppose that Ipswich was Hawes' school, but If it was, and if his birth has been dated correctly, Master Heede was prob ably his teacher. However, it cannot be supposed that Master Heede was much touched by humanism. Cambridge was a stronghold of con servatism, and Mullinger can suggest no evidence of an inter est In Italian humanism or the ideas of the Reformation, be fore 1500, except the presence of one of Petrarch's letters in the library.^ Bishop Fisher, student and master at Michaelhouse, had no interest in humanism or in reformation, and opposed their enroachment upon the university. It is *^Victoria History, Op. cit., p. 330. ■^Jamea Bass Mullinger, University of Cambridge, Cam bridge, 1873, p. 433. J. H. Luptori," editor of Colei's Ex position of St. Paul's Epistle of the Romans, London, 1872>, indreduction. He quotes Erasmus as saying that in 1486 nothing was taught at Cambridge except Alexander, the Parva Logicalis, the old-established readings in Aristotle, and the Questions of Scotus. 13Mullinger, op. cit., p. 425. Fisher got his B. A. at Cambridge In 14877 not probable, therefore, that Master Heede, who got his B. A. nine years before Fisher did, would have gone up to Suffolk with much revolutionary enthusiasm. During the period when Hawes may be supposed to have been going to school, between 1480 and 1490, education in grammar schools was still formal and traditional. More in tlie Utopia, and Erasmus in the Praise of Folly, criticised and satirized the lifeless methods and results; and it is to be remembered that their knowledge of grammar schools was based on memories of St. Anthony*s School, Threadneedle Street,and Deventer,*5 the one the best school in London, and the other one of the first in Northern Europe to feel the effect of the Renaissance. Colet1s plan for St. Paul*s as a school where boys might be taught Greek and Latin lan guage and literature, and Christianity, was so different from current pedagogy that he had to write new text-books,*5 and this was twenty-five years after Hawes went to school. William Horman, under the inspiration of the early interest in Greek at Oxford, taught Greek at Eton, 1485-94, and at *^J. H. Lupton, Life of John Colet, D. D., London, 1909, p. 15. *5P. S. Allen, Age of Erasmus, Oxford, 1914, p. 33; Encycl. Brit. 11th Ed., IX? 728. ISprederick Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More, London, 1869, pp. 213-214. 17 Winchester, 1494-1502, But even if we grant that Hawes may have gone to Ipswich grammar school, it Is not probable that Greek had penetrated to Suffolk, especially under the teaching of Master Heede, trained at Cambridge where there were no Greek scholars for years to come. It seems safe to say, there fore, that Hawes got an old-fashioned XVth Century education at school. The great public schools of the XVth Century had usual ly eight forms, each much larger than present day classes, with a B. A. or high form boy in charge of each.*-8 In large classes the discipline had to be very strict. The teacher dictated the lesson, reading it at least three times, for the words, the pointing, and the construction, and the boys either copied or learned by rote.^-0 The purpose, as In the preceding two centuries, was to teach the boy to read, write, and speak Latin as a preparation for the university. But the prepara tion was often inadequate, and students often went up to the university and left it again without being able to understand the Latin lectures.20 ^A. P. Leach, Schools of Medieval England, London, 1915, pp. 247-48. ^8Allen, op. cit.» p. 35-6, speaking of Deventer. ^°Ibid., and W. C. Hazlitt, Schools, School Books and Schoolmasters, London, 1888, p. 14. 20Hastings Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Mid dle Ages, Oxford, 1895, II; 594 ff. 8 The children were taught the psalter by the parish priest, and later received instruction in singing and points 21 of doctrine. In the grammar schools, besides learning grammar, they read some Latin authors, and occasionally, in regions remote from the universities, studied logic. The chief study was grammar, which was still defined, as in the op Middle Ages, as the beginning and basis of all study.^ The principal grammars were those of Donatus and Alexander de Villa Dei, but various later and better grammars were also in use in England by 1490.2® Besides grammars, there were also dictionaries or word-lists, arranged by etymologies, not al phabetically.24 After the boys had learned some grammar they read texts, partly, at least, for the content. One sort was the compendium or encyclopedia, like Vincent of Beauvais* 2lIbid. 22A. P. Leach, Schools of Medieval England, p. 250. 2^Allen, op. cit., pp. 38-42, describes Garland*s Textus, made more pleasant by being done in verse, and Eberhard’s grammar, which added barbarous Greek to its Latin, both being used at Deventer. Hazlitt, op. cit., pp. 39 ff., says that Bishop Nicholas Peraltus of sTipontum wrote grammars, 1476- 1500, which were printed on the continent and sold in England, and John Annaquil at Free School wrote a Compendium Grammati cus In 1484. Lupton, Life of Joh Colet, p. 21-26, mentions' ' Improved grammars by John fiolt, written between 1486 and 1496, and by Stanbridge. He speak3 also of another interesting com mentary on Donatus: Gerson’s metaphysical interpretation. Al len, og. cit., mentions the commentaries of synthius and Heglus on Alexander*s grammar. 24Allen, op. cit., pp. 43-53. Speculum, written in the Xlllth Century and printed at Strass- bourg in six volumes, in 1472. Its information was arranged in sections: naturale, doetrlnale, historiale, morale, and aimed to comprise all knowledge. Similar summaries gave re- pc sumes of the Bible and popular religion. ° Bashdalh says that Priscian, Cato,2® Ovid, and Virgil, were also studied 07 in school. The list of text-books printed at Deventer be tween 1477 and 1499 suggests how much in the way of Latin aad neo-Latin writers was available to the school boy.28 The list is broad, but chiefly Latin and prose, and how many of them were available in Suffolk in the 80’s is not known. It seems probable, then, that Hawes learned a fair amount of Latin grammar at school, and had read at least a little of Ovid and Virgil and the moral Cato. Grammar and the Latin classics were preferred to the logic and dialectic of scholasticism, in the mid XVth Century, and the study of 25Ibid., pp. 53-4. 2®Especially Distichia Moribus. Lupton, op. cit., p. 25 27Rashdall, ojd. cit., pp. 594 ff. 28Allen, op. cit., p. 63. The list includes Virgil’s Eclogues, Cicero’s wi)e Senectute” and ”De Amlcltia," Horace’s 1 1 1 Ars Poetics," "Axiolus," translated by Agricola, Cyprian’s Epistles, Prudentius* poems, Juvenus* Hlstoria Evangellca, and Legends Aurea, Aesop’s Fables, Pialogu3 Creaturarum, Cicero’s "De offlcils,” Boetius* De Consotatione Philosophise, and De Discipline Scholarium, poems by Mantuan, Alan of Lille’ ”Parabolae, Bartholomew of Cologne * s "Epistola Mythologies.n grammar inclined to be stereotyped and concerned with minu tiae.29 In all probability, Hawes was influenced only by the traditional Catholic religion as long as he lived in Suffolk. The institution and doctrine had been altered from Medieval ism at its height, for example, in the Xlllth Century, but the church at London and Oxford, to say nothing of the provin cial church, had not yet felt the force of reformation ideas. 29Leach, ojo. cit., p. 270. 3%he sketch of the state of the church is based on the following books: Edwin Charles Dargan, History of Preaching, New York, 1905, chapters 9 and 10, pp. 298-542. G. P. Fisher, History of the Christian Church, New York, 1891, Section VII, chapter 4, pi>. 271-86. James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in Eng land, London, 1908, pp. 244-38. Abbot Gasquet, Eve of the Reformation, London, 1905, passim. ---------- -— f Parish Life in Medieval England, Lon don, 1906, chapter 10, pp." 211-52. G. R. Oust, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval Eng land, Cambridge, 1936, Passim. Phillip Schaff, "Hl'sto'ry of the Christian Church, New York, 1892, Vol. VI, chapter 2. Frederick Seebohm, Eve of the Protestant Revolution, New York, 1920, chapter 2. H. C. Sheldon, History of the Christian Church, New York, 1895, Vol. II, Section III, chapter 5, pp. 400-412. Perserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, New York, 1920, chapter 1, pp. 13-29. Traill, Social England, London, 1894, Vol. II, chap ter 3, by W. H. Hutton. H. 0. Wakeman, Introduction to the History of the Church of England, London, 1987, chapters 9 and iu. Williston Walker, History of the Christian Church, New York, 1925, pp. 269 ff. The church was organized as a political structure, from parish priest to pope. The supremacy of the papacy was break ing, however, because of the crime and worldliness of the papal court at Rome, and because of the financial corruption, like the collection of excessive revenues, simony, the sale of dispensations and indulgences, which were perpetrated by the church. England was divided into eighteen dioceses, fif teen for Canterbury, and three for York, each with a bishop, often a non-resident who laxly administered his duties. Suf folk belonged to Canterbury and included eight thousand par ishes, with about twelve thousand parish priests, rectors, 31 and vicars. The parish priests were often ignorant and evil, but the moral corruption of the clergy was diminishing on the eve of the Reformation. The other group that came into contact with the people was that of the monks and friars, who had deteriorated much because of the wealth of the mon asteries and because of the life of beggary into which mendi cancy had degenerated. The Church touched the common people more intimately than any other institution or influence. It absorbed the ordinary man's religions experience and controlled his life at its most important points through public worship, pil- 3^Figures from Wakeman, op. cit., chapter 9. 12 grimages, private meditations guided by books of devotion, and most of all, through the sacraments* It entered his sec- ular life in several ways as well, for he was obliged to pay tithes, and perhaps rents, to the Church as a landlord, and the simple were Imposed upon with relics and indulgences* Cases involving marriage, inheritance, and all points of ca non law were tried in ecclesiastical courts. Most except the most recently founded grammar schools were controlled and taught by the Church, in connection with a monastery or a church. The friars at the universities maintained an effec tive opposition to humanistic and reformative ideas until well Into the first decade of the XVIth Century. A great many men of prominence in political and professional life were churchmen. Hon-resldent bishops were often courtiers or ambassadors to foreign courts. A man frequently received ecclesiastical preferment because of his ability as a lawyer or statesman. In spite of many signs visible to us of decline, or at least, of impending change— the corruption of Rome, the in difference of the priests to parish duties, the persistence of the decaying feudal economics in monastic finance, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the Church, the gen eral opposition to many of its doctrines— the church of the last quarter of the XVth Century, to most within Its folds, probably gave no Impression of weakness. Pilgramages and the 13 worship of the saints were very popular, and are satirized by *20 Erasmus as late as 1518. & Compostella and Canterbury were still frequented, and Erasmus, paying a visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, found it a busy place. Many fine churches were built during this time, and much repair was done to old ones that had become dilapidated in the low times of the mid-XVth Century. However, many provincial churches, among them that at Bury St. Edmund *s, did not flour ish. Under Archbishop Morton many of the grosser evils of the English Church were corrected. The splendid list of Eng lish churchmen of the *90*s, including most of the early hu manists and reformers, shows the great vitality the church still had, although much of the inspiration of these men came from other sources. But the strength and nationalism of Hen ry VII did much to break the secular power of the Church in England. On the whole this seems to have been a time of out ward strength and popularity of the Church, but of inward weakness. It remains to speak of the ideas that came from the Church at this time. These ideas were of two sorts and from two sources: the popular doctrine that came to the people 3^Pamiliar Colloquies. 33Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, pp. 273-75. 14 through preaching and the mass, and the formal scholastic doctrine developed by the schoolmen. The two never fused although they touched at certain points, like the doctrine of the will and of divine grace. But the two were probably not so far apart in the later XVth Century as in the Xlllth. Commentators on the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, such as Reginald Pecock, tried to popularize schol astic doctrine and relate it to pulpit moralisties. However, a certain distinction between the ecclesiastical ideas of the Church and of the school may still be made in Hawes* time, and it is evident from what he wrote that he had been exposed to both of them. In 1281 Bishop Peckham, in the "Constitutions of the Synod of Oxford”, gave instructions to the parish priests in A England as to what their duties were to be. ^ They were to observe the seven canonical hours, say mass on Sundays and holidays, hold confession and communion three times a year, observe the seven sacraments, and give instruction four times a year in the articles of the faith, the ten commandments, the seven works of mercy, the seven sins, the seven virtues, ®4Gasquet, Parish Life in Medieval England, p. 211. Wakeman, op.' cit;., chapter §. 15 •ZC and the seven sacraments* This was the minimum* Priests were also urged to give more continuous Instruction to child ren and adults. This order was reiterated as late as 1466, by Bishop Neville of Oxford, the same who took an interest in having Greek manuscripts copied;36 and from reports of visit ations it seems in the main to have been observed. However, this was a low time in the history of preach ing. One of the earliest books from Caxton's press was one designed to help priests fulfill these obligations of in struction.3* ^ There was a standard plan for a sermon, in herited from the Middle Ages, which Included Invocation,ex ordium, text, disposition, argument or proof, anecdote or fable, and closing prayer. Here, again, "helps’ * were abun dant and often used.38 This form was most rigidly observed In scholastic preaching, in which the main body of the sermon was a theological discussion with subdivisions and refinements of doctrine. This sort was in decline In the late XVth Cen 35In hay Folk*s Catechism, EETS, #118, 1901, Archbishop John Thoresb'y (XlVth C) gives Instruction to his curates to teach the points of belief: the Apostles' Creed; the Ten Com mandments; the seven bodily and the seven spiritual works- of mercy; the chief virtues: faith, hope, charity, justice, pru dence, fortitude, and temperance; the seven sins: "pryde, en- vye, wrathe, glotonye, covetyse, sleuthe, and lecherye.** 36P. S. Allen, Age of Erasmus, Oxford, 1914, p. 121. 37 Mentioned by Gasquet, ojo. cit.,lt was printed In 1483. 38Bargan, op. cit., pp. 309-315. 16 tury and turned to the material, attitudes, and forms of the last two centuries as patterns. In the same way, mystical preaching got its inspiration from the past. Popular preach ing took its cue for form and content from the congregation. At its best it made a sincere emotional appeal; at its worst it used rude jokes and irreverence to enforce sensational ideas. Wyclif, it is true, almost a century earlier, had attacked evils to destroy them, in the light of an intelligent and energetic interpretation of scripture; and his serious re formatory spirit had persisted in limited circles throughout 40 the century. According to the order of Bishop Peekham, priests were to preach on the seven 3ins. Certain of them became more prominent than others in popular preaching. The peasant’s revolt, for example, brought into prominence criticism of the rich, and stimulated preaching on pride and avarice as the chief vices of churchmen and laity. In the same way, preach ers popularized satire of women, as well as criticism of false swearing, drunkenness, gluttony, back-biting, and other vices among the seven, or forbidden by the Ten Commandments.^ 39Dargan, op. cit., pp. 300-309 40Ibid., pp. 331-37. 4^0ust, ££. cit., chapters 6 and 7. 17 Subtleties of doctrine did not enter much into the XVth Century sermon. But a few points were probably clear to ordi nary church-goers. They believed that ritual and the masses were necessary to salvation; that transubstantiation was a literal and physical, as well as a spiritual, truth; that wor shipping saints and relics and saying masses for the dead were part of man’s duty; that purgatory, was an important fact; that deeds of supererogation and indulgences helped to miti- gate punishment; that monasticism was the best way of life. ^ However, there was a large body of scholastic and philosophical doctrine accumulated and surviving from the schoolmen, which must have found some place in the sermons at this time, and surely was taught in schools, as it was in the universities. It is not possible or necessary to give a complete ac count of scholastic philosophy and its survival into the XVth ^ A word should be said about the books of private de votion that were popular at this time. Hilton’s Scola Per- fectionis and This is a devout book, and Alcock’s' ' MonV Per fect Ionia will’serve as examples. These books contain directions for personal devotions and what one may think about at such times: contemplation of one’s sins, Mary, ttthe wisdom and goodness of our Lord in all his creatures, and how one is to conduct his prayers. Usually they give moral instructions on attitudes, like humility and the contempla tive life, and directions how to resist the flesh and the devil. They offer elementary theological instruction on the nature of Christ's sacrifice and the three gifts of Adam: grace, morality, and lordship of all things, and in the stories of the Bible interpreted with much allegory. These books were all printed by Gaxton about the first decade of the XVIth Century. 18 Century* However, a few important problems will be sketched. One of the chief controversies of the Middle Ages was over realism and nominalism. Platonic theology in the Xlth Century, for example, in Anselm, was realistic, placing sub stance or reality in ideas, not in material things. Abelard*s conceptualism, the ideal that the universal exists only in the particular, was heresy and won him the displeasure of the Church. The quarrel was fought over again, but with a dif ferent issue in the XIIIth Century. Thomas Aquinas was one of the chief among those who helped to establish Aristotle, and he does not consider the problem really in the same terms sis did those before and after him. He states the problem of reality in Aristotelian terms: forms are more real than mat ter, but all forms are interchangeable with matter; that is, everything is form to what it is derived from and matter to what it is to become, except the ultimate reality, God, which Is form alone. In opposition to this realism is the concept ualism of Duns Scotus, more Aristotelian than Thomas. For him, reality is the combination of individuality or this-ness, which was Thomas* matter, and universality or what-ness, which was Thomas* form. Occam in the next century carried this Idea further yet and said that universals are merely signs for several similar things, and have no existence apart from par ticulars. During the XlVth and XVth Centuries the universi ties on the continent, especially, and not so violently in 19 England, took sides on nominalism and realism, with victory going gradually to nominalism. Sootus and Occam, it should be remembered, were English, and the tradition in their be half wa3 probably stronger on English soil. Scotus was one of the few people whose writings were still remembered at Cambridge in the late XVth Century, according to the word of Erasmus,4® and the Lady Margaret professor at Oxford in 1497 chose him as being the most appropriate for exposition from the newly established chair of theology.44 This conclusion of scholasticism was anticipatory to the Renaissance. Even before the new learning had brought new translations and a new interpretation of Aristotle, nom inalism had stressed the importance of the individual against the universal. It fostered an interest in science and scien tific method by stressing the importance of the specific and individual. It led to a revival of interest in art by Its implied admission of the value of the sensuous. The decen tralized and differentiated forces of nationalism, the flow ering of outstanding personalities, the development of diver gent and individualistic ethics, are in a measure the product 45Supra. p. 5, n. 12. 44The lecturer was John Langland, Bishop of London, Lady Margaret’s confessor, and he lectured on Scotus’ Quod LIbet. 20 of the nomlnalistic idea* Finally the Church itself was de feated by it* The idea that the individual, and not the uni versal Church, was the measure of value and the criterion of truth opened the way for the philosophical and moral revolts of the Reformation. It is strange, however, that Wyclif, one of the early men to apply this idea to his religious thinking, who denied the authority of the Church and stood out for the rights of Individual men to read and interpret the Bible, was an opponent of Occam’s nominalism. For him the Logos in the mind of God was the only reality, and the basis of reality in all things. Another of the points of contest Ttn scholasticism was the freedom of the will. On one side was Angustinian deter minism: the acts of man are entirely determined by God’s will; man is burdened with original sin, and it is only through the grace of God, not through his own merit, that he is saved. At the other side was the scholastic catchword of free will. Thomas insists upon the freedom of man’3 will,^® to establish the supremacy of intellective substance and to free God from the responsibility for sin. But at the same time he provides for absolute predestination In the hands of God, determined not by man’s merit but by God’s will and mer- ^5For example, Summa Contra Gentiles, 11:48; Summa Theologica, IV: 83. 21 cy.48 Man Is predestined and elected to grace on the basis of Ephesians 1:5, for example.47 This disparity between the free will of man and the determinism of God remained a dif ficulty too great to solve. The will is not really free but is determined in God and man by the choice of the Intellect, the action of which is the highest purpose of man. Duns Scotus exalted will above the Divine Intelligence of Thomas and declared for the freedom of the will both in man and God. For example, God arbitrarily chose the sacrifice of Christ as the terms on which man might receive salvation, and man may freely choose whether he will accept this means of grace.4® Reginald Pecock expresses popularly and simply what was probably the current conservative attitude In the XVth Century. He say in the Reule that man is saved or damned by his own will and his own deeds;49 he includes free will as one of the attributes of the soul, along with reason Cf) and the outward and inward wits, w and as one of the deter- 46Summa Theologica, I: 25. 47Summa Contra Gentiles, XIII: 162. Ephesians 1:5 says tt. . . having foreordained' us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good pleasure of his will." 48C. R. S. Harris, Pun3 Scotus, Oxford, 1927, 1:5. 49Reule of Ghrysten Religion, edited by William Cabell Grant, for the E. E. T. S., London, 1927, II: 18. 50Donet, edited by Elsie V. Hitchcock for the E. E. T. S., London, 1921, Vol. 156, Pt. 1. 22 5 1 mining factors in the moral goodness of an act. A This and other problems of scholasticism ceased during the XVth Cen tury to be philosophical issues and hardened into dogma. However, the freedom of the will was one of the points of doctrine that took prominent place in the vital and fluid thought of the end of the century, and finally became a rock upon which the currents of theology split during the Reforma tion. The treatment of the question of salvation and means to it is not really a problem of philosophy. But it was one that was considered ait length by Thomas and those like him, and by people of widely different attitudes during the time of which we speak. Thomas said that the intellectual under standing of Cod or truth is the final beatitude of man.52 Knowledge is the first necessity of beatitude, to which are added right willing and loving, and these three are essen- tially the same in man, angels, and Cod. Pecock is an ex ample of the popular XVth Century interpreter, or misinter pret ev,? of Thomas. His thinking is formal and mechanical and 5^Follower to the Donet, edited by Elsie V. Hitchcock for the E. E. T. S., London, 1924, Vol. 164, chapter 27. K O Summa Theologica, I: 26; Summa Contra Gentiles, III: 48, 51. ^Interpretation of Taylor, Medieval Mind, op. cit., chapter?>40;,on Thomas Aquinas. slightly allegorical, but he insists on the authority of reason over faith or grace or the authority of the Church. He urges the value of free will, but he makes moral virtue, the law of God, and the doom Of reason identical. To love God, one must know the nature of God.®^ He seems to be aim ing uncertainly at the Thomasian tradition. However, he is touched also with Scotism, which survived with vigor in the XVth Century. For Scotus the final beatitude was the love of God, and it was achieved by a right will, not through the mind.55 Pecock is one of a trio that engaged in an interest ing theological quarrel at the beginning of the century. The means to the end are defined much more carefully than the end of salvation itself, in eaeh case. The Lollards recommended Bible reading as the way to salvation, and were violent against the authority of the Church. Pecock upheld reason, or the ”lex naturalis” of Thomas, the individual's portion of universal intelligence, against both the authority of the Church and the authority of Scriptures. Gascoigne disliked both, and put his trust in the authority of the real Church K4. For example, Donet, Is 1, 2; II: 2; Follower to the Donet, Section 10, 26, 27. 55Interpretation of Harris, o£. cit., pp. 170-180. under the leadership of the Pope, to whom he looked for moral reforms• These are some of the points of view that may have been current in popular preaching and in the theology taught in schools and church classes* The ideas of Thomas, especially as they were reinterpreted by such XVth Century churchmen as Pecock, or by scholarly summaries, were still current, Sco tus was probably more popular, however: I have already spoken of the course of lectures on the Quod Libet by the Lady Mar garet professor at Oxford in 1497. Closer than these two to general thought were the ideas of the early reformers and the answers of the champions of conservatism; %elif and the Lollards, Pecock, and Gascoigne are examples. To these should be added the mystics like Thomas a Kerapis, John Brad- wardine, and others. But it does not seem that mysticism was important in England at the end of the XVth Century. The writings of the mystics do not appear among the first fruits of the English press, and neither churchmen nor poets exhibit tendencies toward mysticism. 56Taylor, op. cit., pp. 20-30; Gairdner, op. cit., pp. 144-160.. CHAPTER II OXFORD What haa been said about the education of Hawes and the early influences upon him is only inference. It is pos sible that he went to Ipswich grammar school and had certain training there, and that he came into contact with conserva tive Catholicism in Suffolk. However, whatever may have been his childhood training, it is fairly certain that after he had completed it he went up to Oxford. This we have from the definite word of Wood,* but what his authority is does not appear. Bale does not name Oxford but simply mentions the "period of his studies through England, Scotland, and France.1 *2 The rolls of Oxford for several years following 1487 were de stroyed, so even his attendance at the university Is not a matter of official record. But it is generally accepted that • z he went there. *Athenae Oxoniensis, London, 1813; "... was instruct ed in all such literature as this university could at that time afford. . .” p &Bale, Scriptorum Illu3trius, 1557. ®For example, The Dictionary of Rational Biography; Berdan, op. cit., p. 74; introduction by Mead to his edition of the Pastime of Pleasure for the E. E. T. S.; Joseph Fos ter, Alumni Oxoniensis, Oxford, 1891, II: 675, etc. 26 The dates for his time at Oxford are likewise a matter of inference. Lupton says that seventeen, More’s age at mat riculation, was young for entrance to the university.^ Golet entered at eighteen, Linacre at twenty, but Latimer at fif teen. If we accept 1475 as the date of Hawes’ birth, 1490 is a tenable lower limit for his time at Oxford, and it would probably be a little later than that', say 1492 or -3. How ever, it is useful to consider 1490 as the beginning of the Oxford influence upon him. A boy preparing for entrance to Oxford would be touched by its influence even before he went there, and on the other hand, the academic life of students at a university has a continuity and survival value that lasts from one college generation to another and remains for a year or so after the influential teacher or student him self has left. There seems to be no information about his life at Oxford, and there is nothing to indicate how long he stayed there. Wood says there Is no way of knowing whether he took a degree,: for the reason, as I suggested before, that the rolls of Oxford were destroyed for that period, and there are no records. It was not uncommon for men to go to the univer sity for a short time only, and then leave for another uni- %,upton, Life of John Colet, London, 1909, chapter 3, pp. 27-28. 27 versity or withdraw into some other kind of life. Erasmus was connected with several different universities for short periods throughout his life. More left Oxford after.two years and returned to London to study law. On the other hand, men often stayed on at the university for several years, studying or lecturing in official or unofficial capacity. It is quite as difficult, therefore,_ to set a date for Hawes' departure from Oxford and the end of its influence upon him as it is to date his coming. But he probably was not there later than 1497 or 1498, when he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. For he spent some time in travel on the continent, and before 1502 he was holding a position at court. The extreme limits of his stay at Oxford, therefore, are probably 1490 and 1498; and between these dates he must have spent three or four years at the university. The 90*s were a time of change for the university, a time of intellectual excitement and of new minds. The medi eval Oxford survived at every point in curriculum and thought, but it was being over-laid and replaced in revolutionary man ner. It does not seem possible that a yaung man could have been a part of the university at that time without being touched by the new life. For the Oxford of the Xlllth Century and the two cen R. Potter, Sir Thomas More, London, 1925, p. 16. 28 turies following, the framework of the curriculum was the seven liberal arts and the three philosophies.6 The trivium, according to the old figure, led the neophyte to eloquence of expression, and the quadrivium led him to wisdom. According to the statutes of 1431, the whole course for the M. A. was eight years: two and a half years for the trivium, and five and a half years for the quadrivium and the three philoso- 7 phies. The two courses may have overlapped somewhat, short ening the time. The course leading to the B. A. was completed in four years, with specific requirements in Aristotle, Dona- tus, Sacro Bosco, and Porphyry, and experience in disputation. So, if Hawes left the university without a degree, as it is probable that he did, he must have gotten only a short way into the quadrivium. Certain authorities were prescribed for each of these studies in the curriculum. Priscian was the text for gram- °For the discussion of Oxford curriculum, see especial ly these books: Hastings Rashdall, Oxford, 1895, II: 455-459. P. P. Groves, History of Education, Hew York, 1912, II: 76-96. H. 0. Taylor, Medieval Mind, London, 1927, II: chap ter 38. Lupton, Life of John Colet, op. cit., chapter 3. ^Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Quadrivium: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astro nomy . Three philosophies: natural philosophy, moral philo sophy, and metaphysics. 29 mar; Aristotle or Boethius, with alternatives as well of Ovid, Cicero, or Virgil, for rhetoric; and Aristotle or Boethius, for logie. Boethius was also the authority for music and arithmetic; Euclid, especially, for geometry; Ptolemy, for 8 astronomy; and Aristotle, for the three philosophies. To these were added, for theology, the Questions of Peter Lom bard and of Duns Scotus. However, it seems that these ideal courses were neither taught nor studied in entirety. Erasmus says that in 1486 at Cambridge little was studied except Alexander, the grammar ian; the "Little Logicals," which were probably Aristotelian commentaries, once or twice removed; the old established read ings in Aristotle, which were re§d not in Aristotle but in anthologies of extracts and commentary; and the Questions of Duns Scotus. Alexander was studied line by line the first ^Specific texts for these were prescribed: Grammar: Priscian, "in majore uel minore." Rhetoric: "Rhetoric" of Aristotle, or "Topics" of Boethius; or "Nova Rhetorics" of Cicero, or "Metamorphosed" "of Ovid, or "Pastoria" of Virgil. Logic: Aristotle’s "De Interpretations," or "Prior An alytics,” or two books of the "Topics," or Boethius' "Topics," Bk. I. Arithmetic and Music: Boethius. Geometry: Six books of Euclid, or Alhacen, or Vitel- lio Perspective. Astronomy: Ptolemy's Theories Planetarum, or Almagesta. Natural Philosophy: Arittbtle's "physics," or "De Caelo et Mindo," or "De Proprietatibus Elementarum;" or Met- eorica,” or "De Vegetabilis et Plantis,” or "De Anima," or "De Animalibus." Moral Philosophy: Aristotle's "Ethica," or "Economi es," or "Follticas." Metaphysics: Aristotle's "Metaphysics". 30 year| and the "Little Logicals" and Aristotle, during the second and third year. The continental universities took sides in the XVth Century between realism and the newer nominalism, and the students had active and physical quarrels over the question. The argument does not seem to have been fought through so eagerly at Oxford. The traditions there were chiefly deter mined on this point by Scotus and Occam,^ tending, therefore, to nominalism and the "via moderna." But these were prob lems of scholasticism, already old-fashioned, and degenerated t into trivialities and nonessentials at the end of the XVth Century. At that time, the conservative friars at the uni versity were concerned in opposing the New Learning that was overturning Latin and Catholic theological traditions with Greek and reformative and humanistic ideas.^ The scholas tic problems still existed as academic questions, but the real battleground had moved to the quarrel between the con servatives and the bringers of the Renaissance. The Renaissance in England, as well as in the rest of Northern Europe, came from Italy. Every important figure of the English revival of learning got his inspiration at ^Maurice De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, London, 1926, II; 186-88. *-°H. 0. Wakeman, Introduction to the History of the Church of England, London, 1927', 'pp. rSO'-TST. '31 some point from Italy. Italian humanism in general was marked by a revival of the real Aristotle, without the veil of Latin mistranslations and medieval misinterpretations, and', espe cially, by a renewed interest In the philosophy of Plato and neo-Platonism. An enthusiasm for originals and sources, and for the study of Greek language and literature for themselves went through all the thought of the Italian Renaissance. In addition, of course, there were other interests in Italy, like science and exploration, and the plastic arts. But the study of pagan philosophy, especially Plato, and the contem porary Italian interpretations, were the first and chief con tributions of the Italian Renaissance to England. Italian influence at Oxford was mainly humanistic until 1496, when Colet returned full of enthusiasm for Savonarola. Interest in Greek was older in Italy than in the rest of Western Europe.^ Barlaam, a monk of Calabra, for ex ample, introduced the dialogues of Plato to Petrarch and taught Greek to the tutor of Boccaccio. However, Petrarch knew Greek very little, and Plato only in snatches a nd at second hand. In the next century,/ interest in Plato was chiefly an interest in the beauty of his form. The first complete manuscript of Plato came from Byzantium in 1438, •^Chiefly based on De Wulf, op. cit., Vol. II: chap ters 2 and 5. and from that time Platonism became a sort of religion in cer tain circles. Pletho was champion of Plato against the Aris totelians; and Bessarion attempted a reconciliation, saying that the difference-between Plato and Aristotle was a differ ence of form only, not ideas. Cosimo d1 Medici stimulated this interest in Platonism by his patronage of the Academy at Florence, and one of his proteges was Ficino. Ficino and his pupil, Pico della Mirandola, both by their direct influ ence and by their influence upon Savonarola, were probably more important than any others in determining the direction of English Platonism, and even the thought of the English Renaissance in general at this time. The first really serious Greek student in Italy was Chrysoloras, at Florence about 1596. One of his pupils, Leonard! Bruni, made translations of Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Demosthenes, and through his translations of Aris totle^ Ethics * influenced Duke Humphrey and his proteges Pecock, Lydgate, and Copgrave. Another of Chrysoloras’ pu pils was Guarino of Ferrara, whose son, Battista Guarino, taught some of the early Oxford travellers in Italy, as we shall see. Another Greek teacher, Chalcondylas, and his pupil, Poliziano of Bologna, were also teachers to these Oxonians. Among the other Aristotelians in Italy at the end of the XVth Century were Theodore of Gaza and his pupil, George of Trebizond, the Averroists of Padua who influenced Pomponazzi. But these were not intimately connected with the 12 English humanists. The papal court was the center of pagan culture in Rome, and the high churchmen were more interested in Plato and Virgil than in the Bible. At Padua, Bologna, and Ferrara, students were studying the renovated Aristotle. In Venice, Aldus was editing and printing the Greek Aristotle. In Flor ence, the Medicis founded the Platonic Academy and patronized Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, and Savonarola had begun to stir the whole city with anger or admiration. Everywhere there was enthusiasm for Greek literature and the Greek language and pagan thought; there was a revival of classical philoso phies; there was interest in science, art, and sensuous ex perience. Into this Italy, beginning especially about 1460, there moved a proeession of English, and especially of Oxford, students, who travelled and studied for a few years, and then •^Dates for these men: Pletho, 1355-1450. Bessarion, 1403-1472. Ficino, 1433-1499. Pico, 1463-1494. Savonarola, 1452-1498. Chrysoloras, FI. 1396, d. 1415. Bruni, 1369-1444. Guarino of Ferrara, 1370-1460. Battista Guarino, 1434-1513. Theodore of Gaza, d. 1478. George of Trebizond, 1395-1484. Pomponazzi, 1462-1525 Poliziano, 1454-1494. returned to England with, knowledge of Italian humanism and zeal for it.*^ Before 1475 five Oxford students, chiefly from Balliol college,.returned to England from Italy where they had been studying with Guarino at Ferrara* George Flemming, Dean of Lincoln from 1452 to 1483, brought to Lincoln College many Greek and Latin books, including manuscripts of Homer, Euri pides, Livy, and Cicero1s nDe Bepublica." William Grey brought to Balliol manuscripts of Petrarch's letters, Poggio, Guarino, Arentino, new translations of 'Timeaus' and *Euthy- phron, versions of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, newly- found treatises of Quintillian, Cicero, and Seneca, and Jerome's letters to Pamonaclinus on Origen's doctrine of ac commodation. John Free got a degree in medicine at Padua, J-^The sources for the discussion of Italian humanism in England: P. S. Allen, Age of Erasmus, Oxford, 1914, pp. 120-30. Lewis Einsteinj The Italian Renaissance in England, New York, 1902, pp. 1-75. F. P. Groves, History of Education, New York, 1912, pp. 110-178. A. F. Leach, Schools of Medieval England, London, 1915, pp. 146-70. H. C. M. Lyte, History of the University of Oxford to 1550, London, 1886, ppT“359^35: C. E. Mallet, History of the University of Oxford, London, 1924, pp. 342 ff. and 408 ff* ’ Frederick Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, London, 1896, passim. Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. Ill, chapter TI J. H. Lupton, Life of John Colet, op. cit., chap ter 3. and, like the others, studied with Guarino. John Gunthorpe and John Tiptoft likewise brought back books from Italy. Sometime between 1460 and 1475, Chandler, the Warden of New College, had the Italian adventurer Vitelli at Oxford to teach Greek to private pupils. In the next decade, 1475 to 1485, Hadley, Selling, and Grocyn were part of the time in Italy, studying with Poliziano and Chalcondylas, and part of the time at Oxford. Selling learned Greek well enough, at least, so that he could trans late Ghrysostrom*s homilies and teach Greek at Oxford in 1495. He was Linacre’s teacher. Grocyn was a fellow at New College In 1467, and may have learned some Greek from Vitelli. He was Inspired by Flemming to study Greek, and went to Italy in 1488 to spend two years there. There he knew Poliziano and Chal- 14 condylas, Aldus and Laurentius Valla. When he returned in 1491 he lectured on Greek at Oxford. These early humanists, with the exception of Grocyn, are not so important for their accomplishments as for the stimulation they furnished to later scholarship at Oxford. The period from 1485 to two or three years before the turn of the century, is the flowering time of humanism at Oxford. 14 He eventually accepted Valla*s view of Pseudo-Diony sius, that the writings attributed to him were spurious and that he was not a convert of Paul. Colet based an important treatise on the “Hierarchy,” accepting it as genuine. 36 After that, the humanists left the university and moved to London or the court. Selling and Grocyn were still important in this great period of Oxford humanism. Grocyn taught Greek at the uni versity in 1491; and Selling, in 1495; the latter, as has been said, influencing Linacre in the direction of his schol arship. Linacre went to Italy with Tilly, a pupil of Vitelli, and with the others studied under Poliziano and Chalcondylas at the court of Lorenzo. At Rome he knew Barabus, from whom he received an interpretation of Aristotle and Galen on medi cine. At Venice he helped Aldus with hi3 edition of Aristotle. At Vicenza he was a pupil of the humanist Leonides. He also studied at Bologna and Padua. At Rome he read the "Phaedo as well as Aristotle. His Italian experience is a comment not only on his own scholarship but also on the itinerant habits of Renaissance students. His interest in Greek was chiefly scientific and scholarly, rather than humanistic and esthetic, and he returned to England to teach Greek at Oxford, to More among others, until 1495. Later he became tutor to the royal children and physician to Henry VIII, and wrote a Latin grammar. Latimer went to Italy with Lin acre and returned to Oxford in 1491, having acquired some knowledge of Greek. After that he stayed at Oxford at least four years. These men were important as modest Greek scholars 37 and Aristotelians. Golet, on the other hand, was a Platonist and Christian above all. He entered Oxford about 1483 at the age of seventeen. Like the rest of these men, he studied the conventional curriculum, but he also read Plato and Plotinu3, is Erasmus says, probably in Ficino1s Latin translations. He went to the continent about 1494, stopping first at Paris and coming finally to Italy. There he studied the Scriptures and learned to prefer the Fathers, Dionysius, Origen, Ambrose, Cyprian, and Jerome, to the scholastics Scotus and Thomas. This may have been because he probably met Ficino, Pico, and Savonarola in Florence, or at least learned to know their work. He returned to Oxford In 1496 to lecture on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Colet was probably more important than any of his con temporaries in bringing Plato to England, and his interpreta tion of Plato, and, at some points, of Christianity, was in- 1 g fluenced throughout by Ficino.x Lupton says that interest ■^Published in 1482 and 1492, respectively. ^Exposition of Ficino from: J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry, XVIth and XVIIth Centuries, New York', I9T5, 'chapter 2. Lupton, edition of Colet’s Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, op. cit., Intro. — t edition of Colet’s Two Treatises on the Hierarchy of Dionysius, London, 1869, Intro. Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., chapter 2 on P s eud o-Dionys ius• H. 0. Taylor, Thought and Expression in the XVIth Century, New York, 1920", I ? 277-83. ....... ........ in Italy led from Cicero* through Plato* Plotinus, and Diony sius, to Paul. Ficino seems to have followed this line of development. He translated Plato, Plotinus, and Dionysius, accepting Plotinus as the true interpreter of Plato and the work on the celestial hierarchy as belonging to Dionysius and influenced by Paul. His chief interest in Plato was In the idea of the sumraum bonum, and in. the doctrine of love as it appears in the nPhaedrus and Symposium. He extracted the two loves, the heavenly love of the soul for the beauty and wisdom of God, and the earthly love that endeavors to tran scend earthly beauty and, through it, to arrive at the love of heavenly beauty. He missed Plato’s theory of ideas and Plotinus’ monistic theory of emanations. Ficino, like Colet, was first of all a Christian, and in "Theologiea Platonica,1 1 1482, he uses Plato to support Christianity on the points of miracles, immortality, and suffering after death. Before this, he was Interested In establishing a rational basis for Christianity, in HDe Religions Christiania.’ * He found these rational proofs in the character of the apostles and in mir acles j in the implications of the Logos and incarnation, as they appear in Plato, Zoroaster, and Dionysius; in the teach ings of Christ and his capacity for lightening burdens of sin and error; In the testimony of the Sibyl; in the necessity of faith admitted by Aristotle as the basis for knowledge, by Plato as the way to God, and by David as the basis of action. These two treatises are contributions to the general tendency in XVth Century Italy to fuse Christianity and Platonism, and to regard the whole of aneient thought, pagan and Christian, as of a piece and reconcilable. Ficino*s pupil, Pico della Mirandola, was also impor tant in determining Colet*s thinking, and More's as well, al- 17 though his full influence was not seen until later. Pico lived a life like that of Augustine, with a brilliant youth, early pleasures, and later asceticism. Self-denial, learn ing, and love of study, humility, otherworldliness, alms giving and devotion were the qualities that his nephew appre ciated most in him. They were the virtues he urged upon his nephew in his letters to him, as well, encouraging him in a holy and righteous life in the midst of a corrupt court, and warning him against the world, the flesh, and the devil. He writes always in praise of learning and the mean estate; and he himself was erudite in philosophy and the Eastern lang uages. Because of his friendship with Ficino, who had just 17 Sources for the interpretation of Pico: Lupton, edition of Colet*s Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, op. cit., Intro. Sir Thomas More, English Works, edited by W. E. Campbell, London and New York," 1931, I: 547-80. Walter Pater, Renaissance, London, 1912, pp. 30-50. Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., chapter IV, section 4. H. 0. Taylor, Thought and Expression in the XVIth Century, op. cit., II: 27-83. finished his Latin translations of Plato, he determined to translate Plotinus, He was interested also in the Cabala, and in Porphyry and Pythagoras; and he sums up his more or less heretical theology in nine hundred propositions drawn from his philosophical study. His interest was chiefly re ligious, but he is a sort of bridge between pagan and Chris tian thought. He touches theological problems in passing, and lightly settles controversial questions. For example, in ’ ’The Oration upon Human Dignity”^ he supports free will, declaring that it is in man»s power to make what he will of himself, brute or divine. Again, in ’ ’Thoughts on the Reli gious Life,”^® he writes that man finds God not by knowledge but by love, denying Thomas Aquinasand vindicating one as pect of the Reformation in a breath. The most famous of his treatises, perhaps, is the ’ ’Heptaplus,” the ideas of which were accepted by Colet and More and used in their own writ ing. It is an attempt to reconcile the accounts of creation in the Timaeus' and in Genesis; and he use3 analogy, double meaning, and symbol to enforce the harmony of the two. There are three worlds, he says, as the ancients did, the super celestial, the celestial, and the sublunary; and the two ex tremes are connected by a mean, the celestial, which is light. 18H. 0. Taylor, ibid, p. 227. ■^Walter Pater, 0£. cit., pp. 30-50 41 The accommodation theory appears here, too, Inherited from the patristic writers, the idea of the adjustment of divine in spiration in the Scriptures to the capacities of the recipi ents to understand. Prom 1494 until his martyrdom in 1498, Savonarola was the ruling spirit of Florence, changing the minds of Pico, Ficino, and Lorenzo himself before their deaths. He was first of all a preacher, zealous in urging social reforms, piety, and ascetism; and he preached the importance of personal re pentance and an individual experience of faith. These influ ences were added to the Platonic Christianity of Pico and Fi cino to change Colet*s interest from humanistic scholarship to Christian reformation. He returned to England in 1496 or 1497 to lead the Oxford reformers.^0 Another student at Oxford in this interesting time was Thomas More.^ He had gone to St. Anthony*s Free School in London, and had been a member of Cardinal Morton's household 20 The phrase is Seebohm's and some without Protestant sympathies would deny that Colet, More, and Erasmus are re formers at all. 21 AFor the life of More during this time: Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., pp. 2S-27. Potter, op. cit., pp. 1-19. Nicholas Harpsfield, Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore; E. K T. S., 1932, #188"," pp* §-2<5“ ; William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, knighte, written by William Roper, esquire, whlehe marled Margaret, daughter of the sayed Thomas Moore. . ♦ Edited by Elsie V. Hitchcock, London, for the E. E. t . S., Oxford pres3, 1935. where he had acquired a love both of learning and of inter ludes. He came to Oxford in 1492, studied under Grocyn and Linacre, and knew Colet. He left in two years, without a de gree hut with an interest in Greek. However, his real classi cal studies came later, during his life in London. Like mo3t undergraduates of his time, he took an interest in music and learned to accompany on the viol and the flute. After his Oxford years, and two years at New Inn, where his practical father sent him to study law, he was admitted to the bar, and thereafter his career belongs to London and the court. His influence upon Oxford at that time was small. He was young and an Immature student and wa3 only receiving impressions. But the kind of impressions he was receiving is evident in some measure from his later thought. The list of those who were at the university during this period brings together an almost Incredible list of bril liant men. Morton was chancellor until 1500. Selling, Gro cyn, Linacre, and Latimer were there as scholars and teachers. Colet was student and lecturer for fifteen years. More said Lyly were students in the early 90*s, and so were Skelton, Bradshaw, and Berners. Barclay was priest at Ottery St. Mary's and had the friendship of More and Morton. Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and Pynson were successively printers at Oxford at this time or near it. Some of these men, at least, Hawes must have known or been influenced by. It does not 43 seem that he could have been at Oxford then without feeling some of the stir of interest in Greek and the new learning, in pagan philosophy and humanism, which was current there. A young man going to the university at that time would have had a dual experience, although it is possible that the contrast would have been less sharp to him than it is to us. Most of the lectures and most of his reading would have been in the traditional texts of the prescribed scholastic courses. He would have read chiefly the philosophy of Aristotle and Boethius in garbled summaries on logic and rhetoric, or in snatches of physics, ethics, or metaphysics, and an encyclo pedic scholastic like Peter Lombard. However, he would have heard a few lectures on Greek language and literature, if he was interested in them, and through libraries and friendships he could have had contact with much of the new learning. Most of the books English printers were publishing were popular and medieval or religious and devotional. But many of the early Oxford travellers to Italy brought back libraries of Italian and Greek books, as has been said. Wil liam Grey, Bishop of Ely, for example, in the middle of the century, brought back copies of Petrarch’s letters and of the writings of Poggio, Guarlno, and Aretino, which would in clude a variety of ideas, from moral speculation and enthus iasm for antiquarian research in manuscripts to pastoral plays and obscene sonnets. He shared Italian interest In rhetoric 44 and Latin moralistics, and brought home newly-found essays of Cicero, Quintillian, and Seneca. Likewise John Shirwood re turned from Rome before 1493 with a great number of Latin classics. Most of Cicero was available before 1490. However, these Latin importations were more important to letters for their form than for their ideas.^ Another mark of the Renaissance was a revived interest in patristic writings. This interest became an enthusiasm with certain of the early reformers, but their influence was felt most a little later. But Grey brought to England Je rome^ letter on Origen; Shirwood, Augustine’s Confessions; and Selling, translations of Chrysostrom’s homilies. Since the Xlllth Century there had been Latin transla tions of Aristotle available in all Europe. In England, for instance, Grosseteste translated Aristotle at Oxford, and stimulated the study especially of the Hlchomanchean Ethics. But, during the XVth Century, Aristotle was being rediscovered in Italy, retranslated, and reinterpreted. This new Aristo- telianism did not yet much affect the Oxonians, except Lin- 22 For lists of books available at that time: Allen, Age of Erasmus, op. cit., pp. 120-125. Lupton, e d. of Colet’s Exposition of St. Paul’s Epi3tle to the Romans, op. cit., Intro, pp. XV-XIX. Lyte, History orOxford, op. cit., pp. 334-5. . RashdalY, History o^ lniveraitiea of Europe in the Middle Ages, op. cIt., pp. 744-54. TrallTT Social England, London, 1894, II: chapter 11, passim. 45 acre, who read Aristotle’s Biology in Rome, and helped Aldus with his edition in Venice. Interest in Aristotle may have been abroad in Oxford outside the scholastic lecture halls, but it was not the important experience then. Most of the Oxford students in Italy had had some sort of contact with the Platonic Academy in Florence, and Plato was, perhaps, the most universal humanistic interest at Ox ford. The Timaeus was the most Aristotelian of the dialogues, and was the one best known in the Middle Ages. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester had the Phaedo and Meno in Latin translation in his library. Grey brought back new translations of the Timaeus and the Euthyphron. By 1482 Ficino had translated and published all of the dialogues, and this translation and his often misleading commentary formed Platonic opinion in England. Ten years later his translation of Plotinus was available. Not only in these texts the ideas of Pico, Ficino, and Poliziano could have been felt by students at Oxford, but also through Colet, More, and others who were influenced by them in Italy. It is difficult to reconstruct conditions at Oxford In that changing period, but these seem to have been outstanding personalities that might have touched a receptive student. Oxford, rather than Cambridge, was the seat of learning in the reign of Henry the VII,and If Hawes went there the ^STraill, o£. cit., II: 686. 46 the fact might indicate an awakened mind. Bale credits him V- only with being learned in doctrine, and it is possible that he was interested in nothing else. But at any rate he was ex posed, for a time, during formative years, to the humanism at Oxford, and this experience must have made some difference in his thinking. CHAPTER III LONDON It has been assumed that after about 1498 Hawes was no longer at the university, and he may have left earlier. He would then have been about twenty-two or twenty-three. The years between his withdrawal from Oxford and his appearance in London are those assigned in this study to his travels. Bale says that he pursued his studies in remote regions, "in Eng land, Scotland, and France;" and Wood, translating Bale free ly, says, "in his travels through England, Scotland, and France, visiting the receptacles of good letters, [he^^id much to advance the foundation of literature that he had laid in this place," that is, at Oxford. Travelling and continuing one's studies at a foreign university were common among his fellow students, as we have seen. Where he went and whom he knew on the continent it is dangerous even to guess. Colet, on his way to Italy, stopped at Paris for a time,’ 1 ' and Erasmus frequently went there. It is possible that Paris was one of Hawes’ ports of call. But it Is Impossible to tell how seri ously he studied; and the "receptacles of good letters" men tioned by Wood need not mean universities, as is usually as- ^Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, London, 1896, p. 27. 48 sumed. He is supposed also to have been in Scotland, and here again it is not known what he did. At least, it is not appar ent that he knew or was influenced by the contemporary Scotch writers, Henryson, Dunbar, and Douglas. He is elusive in his travels, and it is difficult to find any residue of experi ence for these years of his life. He must have returned to England and London about 1500. There is no external evidence to indicate this date. But two or three years was the usual length of stay for travelling p students, and that would seem long enough to travel without a definite objective. Furthermore, by 1502 we find him in the service of King Henry, and it is not to be supposed that he was able to step into the position of a courtier without some previous service unrewarded. He must have been in London for a time to become known to the king and to establish his reputation. According to his biographers this reputation was very remarkable. He is credited with all possible virtues of mind and character. Wood speaks modestly for him and says that t t he being esteemed a complete gentleman, a master of several languages, especially;of French, and above all, for his most excellent vein in poetry, he was received into the court of ^For example, Grocyn, 1488-90, and Colet, 1493-6 49 Henry the VII .** Bale speaks out boldly and says that 9 in speech, in habits, and in all the customs of his life, he ex celled. He attained a most happy temperament. • . and his life was indeed like an example of virtue. * * Of course, this praise is not to be taken as a serious analysis of his char acter, but It may indicate that he was known In London as somewhat of a scholar and a gentleman even before he became a poet. Wood continues that after Hawes had been for a time in the court of Henry, who was ”a great encourager of learning and a judicious understander of men,” the King **made him at length one of the grooms of his chamber.**3 Bale notes three stages in his elevation: ’ ’the court, the inner court, and the private chamber,**^ Indicating the increasing intimacy with the Presence by his three terms, apparently. Henry was not disappointed in his new groom, Wood assures us, for Hawes was ^highly esteemed by him for his facetious discourse and pro ‘■'The fact that he was the king’s groom is noted also, for instance, in the editor’s introduction for Wynkyn de Worde’s 1530 edition of The Example of Virtue; the colophon to his 1509 edition of the ^Conversion" of Swearers;*’ and the Introduction to Wayland’s 1554 edition of The Pastime of Pleasure. Wayland says that the author is "Stephen kawes, gentleman, groome of the chambre to . . . • .kynge Henrye the seuenth. A man (as by his worckes appeareth) of a pleas ant wytte, and a singular learnynge, wherein thou shalt finde at one tyme, wisdome and learnynge, with myrthe and solace. • . • ” ^nAulam,” ”interiorem,” ’ ’secretum cubiculum.” 50 digious memory; which last did evidently appear in this, that he could repeat by heart most of our English poets; especially Jo. Lydgate, a monk of Bury, whom he made equal in some re spects with Jeff. Chaucer.’ 1 His poor literary taste in thi3 latter respect seems not to have hurt his cause with the King, probably because it was an opinion that he'held in common with most of his contemporaries. How much of this can be accepted as literal truth it is hard to say. If it is anything more than a story, it indicates at least that he had industry and intelligence, and no radical brilliance that would keep him from being a successful courtier. That he was really in the retinue of the King is proved by an entry in the documents of the Public Record Office In 1502 which shows that he was granted an allowance for clothes at the death of Henry’s queen. In the pleasant leisure of his court position, Bale says, he was able to write a great deal. During the next ten years of his life he wrote two long poems and three short poems, and probably other things that have now been lost track of. He received royal recognition on at least two occasions: In 1506 he received 10 shillings for a ’ ’ballet,” and in 1521, ’ ’for his play VI L, XIII s, IIII d. ^Berdan, Hew York, 1920, p. 75; Dictionary of National Biography article on Hawes. The public documents referring to Hawes and generally quot ed are: King’s private expense account: 1502, Allowance for 51 Whether the former Is a reference to an extant work now lost it is impossible to say. The stun nfor the play** is the usual amount paid for the presentation of a play at court. The en try, if it really refers to Stephen Hawes, is significant as an indication of his later life in London, and shows that he wrote at least one play presented at court. The accepted canon of his works differs somewhat from the list offered by Bale and Wood, but the five now accepted as genuine are all 7 assigned to him by the printers in the first editions. The poems are dated as well by his statements on the title pages. He gives the dates in terms of the sovereign’s reign, for composition; and the printer dates the editions in the year of Our Lord. So we may know with certainty that The Example of Virtue was written in 1504 and printed the same funeral clothes. 1506, 10 s paid for "ballet that he gave to the king’s grace." King's Household accounts: Jan. 6, 1521, 6 L, 13 s, 4 d, to * ‘Mr. Hawes for his play." In the Archdeanery Court of Suffolk, on Jan. 6, 1523, his will made two years before was probated. ^The writer is indebted to Dr. Gaw for this suggestion. 7Bale lists the following poems: Deleetamentum Spiritus, Amantium consolamen, Virtutis emexplar, De eoniugio principis, Alphabetarium anicularum, Templum crystalllnum. Of these, the"Consolation of Lovers" and The Example of Virtue are real ly Hawes’, and The Temple of Glass is Lycfgate’s. We do not know that the others exist at a 11". Wood mentions The Pastime of Pleasure, finished about.1505-6, The Example of Virtue, and "The Consolation of Lovers" which are Hawes'; Lydgate's Temple of Glass; and the "Delight of the Soul." 52 year, and The Pastime of Pleasure was written in 1506 and printed first in 1509. "The Conversion of Swearers** and "The Joyful Meditation" were published in 1509 in the same edition. The latter, at least, must have been written in that year, since it celebrates the accession of Henry VIII. **The Comfort of Lovers** was printed first in 1512.8 Wynkyn de Worde print ed all of the poems for the first time. Bale and Wood credit Hawes with prose as well, but none of it survives.9 The regular appearance in print of his court poetry in dicates that Hawes remained connected with the court and liv ing in London for several years. No other evidence of his p Since the last two poems are inaccessible this data depends upon the statement of Berdan, o£. cit., p. 76. 9Pollard and Redgrave, in The Short-title Catalogue of English Books, 1475-1640, lists the following extant 'editions: Conversion of Swearers, Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. HN 61309. ------------------------, j, Buiter, (1530?) HN 61308. Example of Virtue, Wynkyn de Worde, (151Q\) Cambridge Library. -------------- — _f Wynkyn de Worde, (1520?) (one leaf) Cambridge Library. — . . .--------------- , Wynkyn de Worde, 1530. HN 61327. Pastime of Pleasure, (editor ?) 1509 (fragment) Cam bridge Library. — ---------- ----, Wynkyn de Worde, .1517. British Museum. -------------------- f j. wayland, 1554. HN 61317, Sir R. L. Harnsworth, British Museum, Chapin Library. --------------------t Richard Tottel, 1555. British Museum. Oxford. ------------------- -t j. waley, 1555. Oxford. Joyful Meditation. . ., Wynkyn de Worde, (1509). Cam bridge Library. The "Consolation of Lovers" exists in a private collec tion not readily available to the public, Berdan says, p. 76. 53 presence in town has been discovered, however* He may have -3 returned to Suffolk after the "Comfort of Lovers" was printed, in 1512, or even before* On the other hand, he received court recognition again nine years later for "a play,” and this would suggest that he had some connection even then with the court and the city of a different sort than he had had before. However, for our purpose this contact is not important because his writing was pastj and whatever effect his J.ater experi ences in London may have had upon him, it did not find ex pression* He had property in Suffolk, as is indicated by his will, and it is not improbable that he spent much of his time during his middle years in his native province. He is known to have been dead in 1530* In that year Thomas Fylde wrote a poem called the "Contraversye Betwyne a lover and a Iaye,"-5 - 0 a dialogue In pastoral setting. The fourth stanza ^ contains a reference to "yonge Steven Hawse,” as an exemplary writer on love. In passing, he says a prayer that God may pardon Hawes* soul, so that it is certain that he *°”Imprinted in fleete st, by Wynkyn de Worde." Hunt. 31384. ll**Yonge Steven Hawse, whose soule god pardon, Treated of love so clerkely & well to rede his werkes Is myne affeccyon Which he compyled of Label! pusell. Remebrynge storyes fruytfully and delectable I lytell or naught experts in poetry Of lamentable love hathe made a dytty.” 54 was then dead. Wood does not know when he died, and Bale does not mention his death* He may have died in 1523 or before, because in that year a will thought to be his was proved in 1 P Suffolk.x If his it was, by its terms his property in Ald- borough, a fairly important seaport town In Southern Suffolk, was left to his wife Katherine. His literary life was less than ten years long, between the ages of thirty and forty, and he died still a young man, hot yet fifty. According to our time scheme, Hawes was travelling, away from England, from perhaps 1497 to 1500, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five. At Oxford in these years a quiet change was coming about. The early humanistic interest was giving place to a reforming spirit, or a purely intellec tual interest was giving place to a religious. Oolet had re- In Suffolk, 1524, op. cit., pp. 52-53, there is a list of those paying "€Ke 'subsidy of 1S'24 granted to Henry VIII by the parliament meeting April 15, 1523, with Sir Thomas More as speaker. It Includes the names of both Katherine and Stephen, among a dozen other Haweses. They are listed in the tax list of Walsham, and paid tax on lands and movables to the amount of five pounds for Katherine and one pound ten shillings for Stephen. Walsham is half way across Suffolk from Aldeborough, and Hawes is supposed to have died in 1523. However, this may be the same as the one whose will was probated In Alde borough. He may have held property in both places, and the tax list may have been compiled before he died In 1523. And if they are not the same, this and not the other may be our Stephen Hawes. There are several Haweses from Walsham but none from Aldeborough. So far as I know, no one has noticed this Stephen Hawes or attempted to solve the problem of his identity. turned from Italy, moved by the personality and ideas of Sav onarola, More was studying The Gity of God, and Groeyn, The Pseudo-Dionysiu3, Erasmus was at Oxford for the first time. Although these men did not accept the Reformation when it came, or take a part in it, their life at Oxford, and later at London, foreshadowed it philosophically, if not historical ly* In 1497, after his return from Italy, Colet -undertook his lectures on Paul*s Epistle to the Romans, Lectures were a common and popular form of expression at London and at Ox ford. Most of the teaching at the university was done by lecturing and reading aloud, and many scholars in unofficial capacity lectured near Oxford whether they were studying at the university or not. There was the same love of lectures at London. In this same year other humanists were pursuing humanistic or religious subjects: More was speaking at St. Lawrence Jewry on De Civitate Dei; and Grocyn, at St. Paul*s Cathedral and Oxford, on The Pseudo-Dionysius» John Langland, Bishop of London, was giving the opening lectures in the new Lady Margaret chair of theology at Oxford, with Duns Scotus as his subject. Where Colet quotes Plato and Plotinus, he quotes ttGlossa Ordinaire,,,Peter Lombard, or Thomas j where Colet speaks of the Grace of God which melts the heart and destroys sin, he recommends purgatory. His reactionary think- 56 1 % ing makes Colet*s reforming humanism more striking,^ In his treatment of Romans, Colet over-rode the medie val attitude toward the scriptures,Scholastic writers re garded the Bible as verbally inspired and attached great value to separate texts and modes of expression. It was not regarded as a record of lives and historical events. The lit eral meaning was of no value, and only the allegorical and analogical meaning was considered, Colet looked at the Epistle historically, and interpreted what he found there in view of Paul*s life and prejudices, the characteristics of Roman life, and the drift of the whole argument. His discussion of Paul*s ideas on freedom and election is important because it continued an old quarrel and ledto a new one in the Reformation. Sin, he said, commenting on Ro mans 3:5-8, comes from man’s nature, and fore-knowledge from God’s. Election is not sure, because those who are ealled may be rejected, and those not called may be called. Man’s ^®For contemporary lecturers, Lupton's edition of Colet*s Exposition of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, London, 1873, InTroT ^Por the discussion of Colet’s comments on Romans, Corinthians, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the letter to Radulph: Lupton, Life of John Colet, London, 1909, chapter 5. , edition of Paul’s Exposition-of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Intro., passim, and text. -— -— , edition of Two Treatises on the Hierarchy of Dionysius, London, 1869, Intro., and 'text. Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., pp. 28-42; 46-90. 57 salvation is to accept the grace of Christ's sacrifice; sin can he overcome by Grace, which means the love of God, Man's part in redemption is the acceptance of grace and the recip rocation of God's love, but Hthe blessedness of mankind . . . rests wholly on the purpose and will and grace of God,*1 he says, basing his conclusion on Romans 9:11, 13. In contradic tion to Thomas, he says that the love of God is much prefer able to the knowledge of God, and supports himself with Ro mans 8:28. It is more fitting and less presumptuous for man to love than to try to know God, and is more democratic, for the weak may leve though they cannot know Him. Colet's atti tude on the will and election is between the freedom granted by Thomas, for example, and the extreme Augustinianism char acteristic of the Reformation. His exaltation of love he has in common with the other early reformers* This year, 1497, was an active one In Colet's literary life. He probably wrote also the lectures on I Corinthians and the letters to Radulphus, the two studies of the Pseudo- Dionyslan writings. The latter is an account of the creation. The first verse of Genesis he interprets as a metaphysical account of the simultaneous creation of form and matter In eternity. The verses that follow are a poetical account of the same act, 0spreading out1 1 the metaphysical idea * -&This is another occurence of the accommodation theory, first supported by Origen, to the effect that intellectual level of the scriptural inspiration Is adjusted to the under standing of those to whom it Is addressed. 58 into speeifie terms understandable by common people. In the Pseudo-Dionysian treatises he reiterates the importance of love as the essence of religion, and emphasizes the mystic and reformative suggestions in the writings he is discussing. He finds reform in the direction of return to the primitive or divine sacrament and true priesthood. Christ's sacrifice is to redeem man, not to propitiate God, another idea charac teristic of the Reformation. The lectures on Corinthians again stressed two of the points at which he touched the re formers: the need of reforming the Church and of following the example of Christ. In the next year Grocyn also was working on the Pseudo- Dionysian writings, and giving lectures on them. In the midst of his lecture course he discovered, probably under the in fluence of Laurentius Valla, that the writings were spurious, not the works of a disciple of Paul; and he had the courage and honesty to announce his discovery. The same year, Eras mus came to Oxford from Paris to study Greek. He became a friend of Colet and More, and, especially with Colet, had many discussions on problems of theology. They considered the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, the merits and demerits of the Scotists, the nature of the emotion of the “agony of the gar den,1 1 the “four-fold truth” of Scriptures. But when Erasmus left England again Colet regretted that he had changed the great man's ideas so little in the direction of liberalism. 59 At about this time Erasmus* other friend, More, was lecturing on De Civitate Dei, This indicates that both the lecturer and his hearers had an early interest in utopianism and patristic writings, but the contents of the lectures are not known. All of these things were going on, of course, during the time assigned to Hawes* travels, according to tradition, in France and Scotland* But while he was not then at Oxford to be a part of this new life, he must have felt the effect at his return of what had happened during his absence. The vi-( tality of the early ideas of these men carried over into their later thinking, and Hawes could surely have felt their effect in his later life in London* For by 1500 most of the Oxford humanists had deserted Oxford for London and the court.^ The King and Prince Henry, were sympathetic to learning, and especially to Italianism, and some found a place at court. Linacre was tutor to Prince Arthur, and Skelton to Prince Henry, perhaps,at this time. Bernard Andreas, the Blind Poet of Toulouse, also may have taught Prince Arthur. Erasmus and More visited the Princes ^6Potter, Sir Thomas More, London, 1925, pp. 18-19. •^Allen, Age of Erasmus, Oxford, 1914, p. 129. Ein3teinT Italian Renaissance in England, New York, 1902, pp. 50-57. Traill, Social England, London, 1894, chapter 9. *-®F. M. Salter, “Skelton* s Speculum Prlnolpis,** Spe culum 9: 25-57, Ja 34. before Erasmus1 departure from England in 1500, and presented complimentary poems. More had Just been admitted to the bar and was practicing in London* His lectures on De Clvitate 1 Q Dei may have been delivered as late as this. 5 7 Linacre was preparing lectures on Aristotle’s Meteoralogia which More at tended. Grocyn was occupying his city living as rector of St. Lawrence, and William Lyly was a London schoolmaster. Within five years Colet was dean of St. Paul’s, More was a member of Parliament, Erasmus was again in London, Skelton was laureate for Cambridge and rector at Diss. A few years later again, shortly after the accession of Henry VIII, More was Undersheriff of London, Linaere was Physician to the King, Colet founded St. Paul’s School, Erasmus was again in London and said that there were five or six finished Greek scholars to be found there. As a courtier and poet with pub lished works, Hawes could, during these years, have met and known many of these men and have been influenced by their ideas. A year or so in More's life at this time is a sort of ^Seebohm gives the date 1500, Lupton a little earlier. The same difference is found in the date for Grocyn*s lec tures. epitome of Renaissance life in London.^0 In 1503-4 lie dis tinguished himself in Parliament by successfully opposing Henry1s extravagant demands for money. Henry was very angry, hut the only way he could vent his displeasure was by finding a pretense for putting More1s father in prison under a heavy fine. However, More withdrew from public life for a time. He lived with Lyly and studied "music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, learning the French tongue, and recreating his tired spirits on the viol," Roper says, and, as he had done five years before, he considered becoming.a Carthusian monk. But his friendship with Colet, his interest in scholarship, his work on the life of Pico della Mirandola, and his revul sion against the impurities of monastic life led him away from Charterhouse, though he maintained his ascetism. Another influence in favor of the active life was his friendship with the Colt family, which led to his marriage to Jane Colt, the eldest daughter. His experience of making a decision between the contemplative and active life may have been the experi ence of many of his contemporaries. The life of active schol arship, public service, and family responsibilities was being counted as good by the most sensitive, and was frequently °Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, London, 1896, pp. 142-60. Potter, op.' cit." , pp. 32-55. Encyclopedia Mritannlea, Hugh Chisholm, general ed., Hew York',' 19X6, xTth edrtion, XVIII: 822-23. 62 chosen Instead of the Church. Hawes put the situation into the allegorical pattern of The Pastime of Pleasure, which he wrotefthe same year that More’s struggle was going on. It is difficult to separate humanism from the reform ing spirit in England at this time. More’s interest in De Civiate Dei was between philosophy and religion, and was an enthusiasm both for Utopia and for the New Jerusalem. His study of Pico led partly to an Interest in Plato and Neo-Pla- tonism, but chiefly to an interest in Pico’s Christianthought. Two poems^ written about 1503 are worth mentioning, if not for their humanism, at least for their connection with his contemporaries. The first is a series of nine stanzas, one on each of nine tapestries designed for his father’s house. Each stanza describes one of the pictures. The first gives the figure of a boy with a top; in the second a youth is vic torious over the boy; In the next, Cupid and Venus are victo rious over Youth; in the fourth ”01de Age” overcomes Cupid and Venus; next ”Deth wins over "Olde Age11; then Fame; "encom passed round with Toungs," overcomes Death; Time, "with an horloge,” in the seventh, overcomes Fame; finally, Eternity blots out Time, since Eternity has infinite empire, and Time Is only "mobility,” dependent on the sun which will pass from being; and all are depicted by the poet, who can therefore overcome them all. This, we shall see, is almost the formula / ^lEnglish Works of Sir Thomas More, London, 1931, Is for The Pastime of Pleasure. The other poem ia about Fortune, telling how she casts down a knight here, enriches a beggar there, and impoverishes a man of wealth, to show her power over men. The wise, therefore, choose humility and poverty. The figure of Fortune is from the past, of course; but in a few years the mean and sure estate was to be quite the fash ion, in poetry, an Horatian and pastoral attitude, and in sociology, the nobility*s acceptance of the life of the coun try gentleman instead of that of the courtier, in the inter ests of peace. The poem begins with an indictment of astro logy. Colet must have continued his Oxford interest in Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Ficino; and his plans later for the school at St. Paul's contain much provision for humanistic use of the classics. But his life was mostly absorbed then in his duties as Dean and preacher at St. Paul's. Linacre, who knew his Aristotle from Aldus, about 1505 was preparing a lec ture shortly to be given on the Meteoralogia. The Meteora- logia is a discussion of heavenly phenomena, the behavior of water, wind, earthquakes, and other natural disturbances, the operations of cooking and freezing, and like problems of geo physics. These lectures show that Linacre and his audience had a scientific, or physical, rather than a metaphysical, in terest in Aristotle. In general, it seems that Platonism, es pecially as It was interpreted by Pico and Ficino, and a nar- 64 row knowledge of Aristotle continued in London as at Oxford to be the results of humanism in these years* Another source of humanism, apart, to some extent, from the transplanted Oxford group, should not be overlooked. This was the already Italianate court of Henry VII.22 The King knew the Duke of Ferrara and Urbine, and had several Italians in his employment. Even outside the eourt we find the cour tier Ammonio, for example, in the brilliant household of More. These Italians contributed two ideas: one was the ideal of a gentleman as having an all-round development and the qualities of learning, civility, and virtuej the other was the ideal of Petrarchianism, with the added influence of Ficino's Platonism, in the attitude toward love. However, most of the philosophical life of London In the first decade of the century seems to have been religious, and the tendency increased rather than diminished during the years following. More's work with the life and writings of Pico della MIrandola has already had attention. He may have received the biographical materials from Lyly after his Ital- pns Ian journey. The life Is a translation of the account, by Pico's nephew, so the insistence upon the piety and virtue of 22Einstein, oj>. cit., pp. 58-115. ^English Works of Sir Thomas More, op. cit., I: 347- 362. ! Pico, almost to the exclusion of any other aspect of his life, is not More*s own. But this was the Pico that More admired and loved. The biography gives a picture of a man of youthful pleasure and later asceticism and study, persecuted and dis owned by his family because of his change of heart. He had lived an exemplary life and died properly in the bosom of the Church with the blessing of the sacrament, and from thence his soul*s probable progress is traced to Purgatory and fi nally to glory. He is treated as an ideal person, partly be cause he was a learned humanist, but chiefly because he was a good Christian. More shows the same attitude in his choice of Pico1a works to edit. He translates three hortatory let- QA ters of Pico to his nephew the gist of which has already Or been indicated. He quotes much from the Hew Testament and recommends it to his nephew as an armor against the Devil. The old allegorical thinking persists, for example, in the figure of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil; but a new in terest in religion as having a practical purpose in active life, and in the New Testament as an instrument to the good life, show the reforming tendency in Pico and in More. Other of the translations are more thoroughly traditional. One is a phrase by phrase interpretation of the XVth Psalm, in the 24Ibid., pp. 363-74 25Supra, p. 39. old fashion, in dispraise of money, glory, pleasure, and other gods. There are also lists of the twelve rules and twelve 27 weapons for the good life, and the twelve properties of love, all formal and pattern ideas. There is another aspect of Pi co's writing, too, illustrated by the little treatise "Thoughts on the Religious Life," and a short poem, also translated by More. In the first he says that man finds God not by know ledge but by love. In the poem he holds up Christ's example as an incentive to love and duty, and gives passionate and sensuously vivid presentations of His suffering and purposes.28 These two ideas, the importance of the love of God, and the realization of the ideal personality of Christ as an example of conduct, are characteristic of one side of the Reforma tion, and Pico held them in common with Colet, for example. More's translation of the life and works of Pico was printed by John Rastell in 1510, but it was very probably written about 1504 or 1505, and would have been available in manuscript copy. It is possible, therefore, that Pico's ideas were circulating among More's friends, the scholars, and court circle of London, between 1505 and 1510, and Hawes may have heard them discussed or even have read them himself* 28English Works of Sir Thomas More, op. cit., pp. 374-80. 27Ibid., pp. 381-96. 28Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., p. 157. When Erasmus returned to London In 1505 he had pub lished an edition of the Adages, dedicated to Lord Montjoy, had written the ,,Encheiridion,t * and had edited with a preface p Q Laurentius Valla*a Annotations upon the Hew Testament* In the nEncheIrid ion” he said the same thing that Colet and More had been saying, that the test of true Christianity is not in doctrine but in loyalty to Christ. Anyone can conquer sin with the aid of Christ, if he cares to make use of this aid. This makes the old problem of the freedom of the will and re demption a matter of immediate and perosnal relationship with Christ. Another interest of hi3 was getting the true text of the Bible. Learning to read the New Testament In Greek had been his motive for going from Oxford to Italy and back in search of Greek teachers. In the edition of the Annotations he defends the corrections and emendations to the Vulgate text which Valla suggests. He had no patience with the old idea that the Scriptures were verbally inspired and could not be altered from the form In which they traditionally appeared. He loved Paul and preferred the patristic writers to Augus tine. He disliked scholasticism and the corruption of the Church. And these ideas he must have shared with More when he visited him in London. Colet was an active preacher at St. Paul's during these 29Ibid., pp. 173-79 years, and perhaps we can assume that his Oxford attitudes of 1497-8 continued* He must still have had a love of Paul and his writings, and he must have preached salvation through Grace of God. He must have stressed the importance of loving, not knowing, God, and of Christ as an example of conduct* He shared Erasmus* dislike of popular confidence in relics and pilgrimages and anticipated Tyndale’s zeal for the vernacular Bible. His preaching was liberal to a degree, it seems, for he frequently had Lollards in his congregation. One has to determine the nature of his preaching in this decade of the century by taking two sights upon it, from writings before, and after. His thought at Oxford we have discussed. An in dication of his subsequent preaching is the Convocation Ser- *30 mon of 1 5 1 2 . It was delivered at the opening of an eccle siastical convention for the extirpation of heresy. He had the boldness to preach to the bishops not of external heresy but of their own faults and the necessity of reformation within the ranks of the clergy. He justified his pleas for reforms by quotations from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, and took as a text Romans 12:2: "And be ye not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and per- 50Ibid., pp. 230-47. Lupton, Life of Colet, op. cit., pp. 293-304 for text, and pp. 178-188 for discussion. 69 feet will of God." His general interpretation of the text is that the people before him must avoid conforming to the world, and thus becoming carnal, but must be reformed according to the spirit, becoming spiritual. The first part of the sermon outlines the sins of the world. These sins are devilish pride, carnal con cupiscence, wordly covetousness, and worldly occupation, for as John says, "All things that are in the world are either the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eye, or the lust of life." Each sin he applies to churchmen. They have pride, or the desire for power, while Christ said he came to minis ter, not to be ministered unto; they have the" lusts of the flesh or worldly pleasures; they are covetous after riches; they become entangled in worldly occupations. The second half of the sermon deals with the reformation through the opposites of these sins, humility, sobriety, charity, and spiritual oc cupation; for, quoting Paul, he says "we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this world." Then he names a list of specific ains that priests must avoid. They must admit no unworthy people to the priesthood; they must avoid simony, non-residence of curates, worldliness of clergy,., corruption of ecclesiastical courts, infrequent councils. First the bis hops, then the clergy, then the people, must reform. This sermon does not suggest Protestantism, of course, but the reforming spirit is strong in it, as well as the old 70 love of Paul and the application of religion to practical and specific points of conduct. So complete a summary of the ser mon has been given because of a striking parallel between it and an earlier poem of Hawes. The opening years of the century in London, them, are more religious than humanistic. But the religious and reform ing zeal did not make itself felt so strongly until about 1505. This was due partly to biographical accidents. Colet became Dean of St. Paul*s in that year. Erasmus returned to London from the continent. More experienced his crisis of decision between the active and the contemplative life, and as consolation in this time studied Pico. We should expect Hawes to be influenced by the humanists of the court and of London before that year, but we should not expect him to feel the influence of a revived religious life until later. As has been said, the religious thinking of these years is not Protestant, and none of these men was willing to accept the Reformation when it came. But it is thoroughly reforma tive, and influenced also by Platonism. In general the think ing of these men turns toward the Hew Testament and away from the schoolmen. It accepts Christ and the apostles immediate ly a3 examples for conduct and means to salvation. It em phasizes the importance of love in preference to knowledge as the way to the experience of God. PART II - THE WORKS OP HAWES CHAPTER I THE EXAMPLE OP VIRTUE The Example of Virtue is Hawes* first extant work, Wynkyn de Worde says, in the 1530 edition, that it was **eom- pyled by Stephyn Hawys one of ye gromes of the most honorable chambre of oure souerayne lorde kynge Henry the VII, And pryted the XX day of Aprylle, Anno dn MCCCCXXX.1 1 In the 1512 edition he gives the further information that it was written in the nineteenth year of Henry*s reign,® This gives the year 1504 for the date of composition, and 1512 and 1530 for the first edition and the reprint, respectively. The Example is one of the poems attributed to Hawes by Bale and Wood, but their testimony is not necessary when we have Wynkyn d© Worde*s. Wood was probably simply copying the words of the editor when he calls Hawes the groom of the chamber. Hawes wrote The Example when he was twenty-eight, dur ing the. first years of his service under Henry. He had been ^■The Example of Virtue, 1530 edition. HN 61327. This is.the text used. ' , . > . • • • * . ^Cambridge History of English Literature, II: 255-6 A copy of t h e 1512 edition lls in the Pepyslan Library, Cam bridge. 72 at Oxford and had travelled, but he had not been much touched by the life In London and at court. He seems still to have been under the influence of his conservative training. At least, in this first creative writing he seems to have drawn upon the theological and moral patterns that he had learned in his early life, and the poem in general has this mark. This is not surprising. Writers often turn first to the sur roundings of early adolescence for their material. Hawes clings in this poem to the literary forms and the theological and moral concepts of his Suffolk youth. The Example is a didactic allegory In the atmosphere of chivalry. Hawes tells us in the Prologue that his pur pose is to teach, “for the profyte of humanyte,” and to ful fill Paul*s desire that ”all that is written is to our docu ment.” The Prologue ends with praise of the popular trinity, moral Gower, noble Chaucer, and ’ ^ertuous” Lydgate, and with regrets for his dullness.3 He frequently deplores his sloth and ignorance, and finally4 despairs of aid from his literary guides and prays for God to give him “sapyence.” The poem itself opens like a vision. Overcome with , l ; slouth,w the poet sleeps; and Morpheus takes him to a Hmead- owe amerous,” full of ^delycious” flowers. Here he meets 3Stanzas 1-4. 4St. 302-4. 73 "the ladye dyscresyon," who is to be his guide, and promises "blysse eterne” to those who follow her. She is inclined to speak in moralistic platitudes and to advocate expediency.® Ihen she has concluded a discourse in proverbs, they, board a ship called "the vessel of the passage daungerous" and cross the water called Vainglory to a beautiful jewelled island. There is a remarkable castle on the island, with sym bolic figures on its exterior and tapestries within; and the owner of the castle is Fortune, who turns her wheel, and smiles and frowns arbitrarily upon men. The other inhabitants of the island are three ladies like herself, each with her own house to live in.® Most of the first half of the poem is devoted to these four sisters. Fortune controls man's destinies by her arbi trary power. Hardynes is surrounded by nine soldier queens, but even their splendor has to yield to Death. Sapience or Prudence is granted a great deal of virtue, and the right of preeminence over the other ladies. Here the poet forgets thatj^,0/ Discretion is his guide. He has himself introduced to her'"'"^ because she is the sister of Sapience, and she again instructs him with practical proverbs. Finally they come to the palace of Nature, who created all things. She is beautiful in front but ugly behind, and Death lives with her.f 5St. 6-18 6St. 19-39. 7St. 40-76 V ' 74 After a short visit to the little-frequented House of Geometry, they meet Justice, and the four ladies appear before her court to plead their cases. Each one states her own values before Justice, this time appearing in altered se quence. Hardynes comes first and names a list of great sol diers who won power and fame through her, to prove that her aid is more valuable than Wisdom’s. Sapience comes next, and as before is given preeminence in point of space. She claims to be the foundation of the Seven Arts, and the way to heaven and the knowledge of God. Hardynes is useless without her counsel. Then she gives a lecture on the theology of schol asticism, names a list of six virtuous modes of conduct, and commends herself to Justice. Fortune says that she must be favorable before either of the other two can prevail, for she can raise or cast down whom she likes according to her own capricious will. Finally, Nature comes to claim superiority, because none can resist physical laws and death. Justice makes no decision about the merits of the ladies, but all agree to use their strength for man's good.8 After the trial before Justice each lady goes her way, but Sapience and Discretion tarry to give further counsel to the hero. Their advice to him is that he should marry, wto esehewe all yll sensuaiyte," and they suggest to him a fair 8St. 77-149. 75 and virtuous lady, Dame Clennes.9 With Discretion as his guide he again sets out on a quest. They cross a meadow full of birds, and ”a ryver named Ephesyne,” beside which a queen is dancing. After the sun sets they wander into a wilderness and become benighted, under the wrong phase of the moon. They meet wild beasts and hard ways, and, presently, adventurous experience. The first person they meet is a lady on a goat who of fers herself to him ”to fulfyll the flesshly pleasure.” But he is strong enough to refuse her because he wants to keep his chastity for Dame Clennes. When this temptation is over, he meets an amiable old lady riding on an elephant ”. . . . . . . in strength so stable Whiche it to bere was good and able.” She carries a jewelled cup and offers him riches if he will go with her. But he prefers his companion Discretion, through whom he hopes to g§in a heavenly kingdom and fame. He con tinues, comforted by Discretion, in the midst of the Wilder ness of Worldly Trouble, and she commends him on his escape from Sensuality and Couetyse. Presently they come to the maze of “the busynes of worldly operacyon,” and Youth gets lost in it. In the midst of it he finds Sapience, whom he discovers has been his unknown guide through many of his trials* He ^Variously spelled by Hawes 10St. 151-164 76 consents to be rule by her, and she brings him to a tidal river. Beyond, they see a castle, and the Lady Clennes, de mure of countenance and without pride* But there Is only the narrowest bridge over the river, and the water is swift with the vanity and uncertainty of life* However, because he is upheld by Sapience and Discretion, and because his heart is pure and steadfast In the belief in God, he crosses In safety to the Country of Clennes.^ The party proceeds across the border line into the do main of Clennes, where none can go unless guided by wisdom. They come to the castle of the lady’s father, Love, who is so symbolically arrayed that **hym for to se it was a wonder.'* After Youth meets the father he is formally presented to Clen nes with her three crowns of chastity, and he is given a trial of strength, to overcome a dragon with three heads, the world, the flesh, and the devil. He is armed by Sapience and Clennes In the armor of the soul described by Paul in his epistles, and although it Is getting dark the three of them set out on 12 their search for the dragon’s dungeon. They presently find him In his lair, Oblivion, where he drags all the souls he conquers. Youth and the dragon begin their battle, and the hero would have been overcome if it had not been for the presence of Sapience and the encouragement of u St. 165-183. 12St. 184-202.. 77 Clennes. However, with their aid he is able to cut off two of the heads, the world, which keeps man from heavenly glory, and the flesh, which inclines him to deadly sin, and to drive the dragon with only his third head back to its infernal home whence none escape. Here follows a short interlude on the means of salvation from such a fate.-*-3 After these labors, Youth returns to the castle and is welcomed by several beautiful ladies called Perseverance, Faith, Charity, Prayer, Love, Clennes, and Grace. He makes a speech to Clennes, calling her “sterne of blysse efeerneu and “well of vertu,and she and her father finally consent to the wedding. The next day they meet in her garden, a prototype of the celestial paradise that belongs to man as a reward of virtuous life, and she gives him a “Margarita.1 1 Later in the day, after further preparations, the wedding .takes place, in the presence of St. Austin, St.-Peter, several pious virtues, and church fathers. After the ceremony there is a feast at which King Edmund and Edward the Confessor are added to the list of guests, and St. Peter administers the sacrament, our chief hope of eternal life*'1 ' 4 When all this has been accomplished, Youth, now called Vertu, is enfeebled with the weight of forty years and de sires rest. He longs for the "solacyous” garden he had a 13St. 203-213 14St. 214-266. 78 foretaste of in his lady's garden, and she promises that Raphael will take them there. But before this is possible his angel takes him on a cosmological tour of.the three levels of hell, prepared for those who erred in doctrine. Prom there they go to Paradise and hear a celestial choir singing "Gloria Patri" and ttSanctus." Finally comes the Consummation, in the eternal contemplation of God, and Vertu and Clennes are truly joined in marriage.'*'5 As an epilogue, Hawes voices a prayer for the preserv ation of the Red Rose, and for the success of the union of the Red Rose and the White. He prays for the safety of Henry VII and Lady Margaret, his mother, and praises the King for every virtue. Finally he a3ks that his own "thoughtful1 herte" may awake and be "enlumyned" with God's Sapience.^6 If one drops the details from the story and looks at the bare outline, both the artistic and the philosophical structure stand forth with a clarity which must be respected. Under the guidance of Discretion, Youth receives practical instruction and visits the four ladles, Nature, Fortune, Hardinesse, and Wysdome, to learn what they have to teach him. The four contend before the tribunal of Justice to de cide which is most useful to man. He Is advised to marry, and in his quest for his lady, Clennes, he overcomes, with 15St. 267-291 16St. 293-304. 79 the aid of Wisdom, a lady on a goat and a lady on an elephant, a maze, a river with a treacherous bridge, and a dragon with three heads* He is united to his lady, with the consent of her father, Love, and finally goes with her,to heaven to find peace and attain the vision of God* Hawes has much to say in The Pastime, and an occasional word in The Example,* about the real meaning that the skill ful writer hides under the literal and obvious content. This idea of the necessity of allegory is more than a medieval lit- 1 Q erary tradition.4 . It was a common principle in the inter pretation of the Scriptures. Origen,^9 for instance, said that there were three uses to Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual. The literal hides the real sense, repelling the ignorant, stimulating the true child of God to increased exertions, and protecting the truth from scoffing pagans and weaker brethern. Thomas found a four-fold truth: the historical, the allegorical, the analogical, and the 20 moral, all contained in the literal meaning. He justifies 3-TFor example, St. 129: ”fatallt t (that is, prophetic) poets ”... craftely coloured with cloudy figures The true sentence of all theyr seriptures.” •^Berdan, New York, 1920, p. 76, says Hawes gets the idea from Boccaccio. ■^Charles Bigg, Christian Platonista of Alexandria, (1886), Oxford, 1915, ppTTTCTBI 20Summa Theologica, Question 1, Art. 10. 80 this multiplicity much as Origen had done; it stimulates the thoughtful mind and defends the Scriptures against the ridi cule of the impious. The **four senses1 * influenced the medie val sermon.and even formed the subject of a discussion be tween Colet and Erasmus involving the problem of the literal inspiration of the Bible. At any rate, allegory had been sup ported from the philosophic point of view by wiser men than Hawes, and he was following an honorable tradiiton in his at tempt to veil his meaning* He does not leave us much in doubt about the moral im plications beneath the literal story, and the theology and ethics are usually too lightly draped for artistic decency. But this fault in beauty is a virtue in philosophy. At least his artistic purpose never obscures his didactic purpose or runs away with his idea. He pursues both with terrible per sistence, and helps the reader with broad hints and frank explanations whenever there is the smallest possibility that his allegory is not being understood. The general direction of the allegory is simple and single. After the young man has learned the value of nature, or the physical life, courage, chance, and wisdom, he must be guided by wisdom to achieve the virtue of chastity. He can realize this ideal only after overcoming various sins of the world and the flesh. When, through wisdom and love, he attains this virtue of chastity, he ascends to heaven and knows the perfect beatitude of the sight of God. The details fit precisely into the general scheme, because the whole al legory is worked out intellectually, and the action is con structed to fit the idea. Except for a few decorative land scapes, almost every situation and character has a serious purpose in the allegory. The meaning of the details is usual ly so obvious that it does not need explanation. Part of the allegory, it should be observed, by convention had come, long before Hawes* use of it, to be taken as literal truth; that is, the three grades of hell, the scene in paradise, and the per sonality of the devil. Hot much has been done in determining sources for The Example, it has been said in general, that Lydgate’s Temple of Glass, attributed by Bale to Hawes, and mentioned by Hawes himself in The Pastime, suggests specific lines in the de scription of the Temple of Love in The Example.2^ ~ The Cam bridge History finds its sources in chivalric romance and in 22 medieval scholasticism and theology, but is no more specific. Berdan says that Lydgate, Image du Monde, and Martianus Capel- la, the encyclopedist, provided the matter for this poem as well as for The Pastime. u Wells goes into details about 2lE<3ition by Schick for E. E. T. S., London, 1891, Vol. 60: p. 129. 22II: 260. 23Berdaii, ojd. cit., p. 78. the relation of The Court of Sapience and The Example.2^ He finds many parallel passages in which details are apparently borrowed. He suggest especially that the importance of Sapi ence in The Example was determined by The Court of Sapience. But this characteristic the two poems have in common with all medieval thinking, so the point proves only that both poems have medieval roots. A series of parallels running through all three poems, The Court of Sapience, The Example, and The Pastime, he considers to be an indication of the initial in fluence of the first upon the second, and the development of the ideas thereafter in the last.25 The most significant parallel is the passage about the three grades of hell which Vertu finds in his tour of the universe, and which with slight changes became the three levels in the House of Correction for erring lovers, in The Pastime. The three grades of hell are found in The Court of Sapience and also in St. Macarius and in Caxton* s Golden Legend. 2^Whitney Wells, ^Stephen Hawes and The Court of Sapi ence.” Rev, of Eng. St., July, 1930, pp. §84-94. 25He suggests the following parallels in the three poems: identification of hero and author, conduct over water, the debate, the golden arras, the bridge motif, inscriptions, seven ladies and other allegorical dames, Minerva, symbolic armor, the wilderness, the figure of anophora, Sapience, the debate of the four daughters of God. This last is not clear. The debate in The Example is between Nature, Fortune, Sapi ence, and Hardynesse. fEe four daughters of God are Mercy, Peace, Justice, and Truth. 83 However, the search for literary sources is not always fruitful in uncovering the sources of a writer’s ideas. A man may read a poem in his maturity and adopt images from it, be cause he had enjoyed an esthetic experience. But his ideas he is quite as likely to find in other places. His weekly re ligious experience at church and his daily study at school would be a more vital influence in determining the direction of his thought than the poetry he read for occasional amuse ment, no matter how much he enjoyed it. The problem is to find specific sources, not for Hawes’ medieval, but for his Renaissance, ideas, and for this purpose specific sources in medieval literature do not 3eem important. The sources of hi3 philosophical ideas are diffused, and come from a hundred directions. If one should find verbal paral lels in a specific poem which would indicate that he was In fluenced by that source In his statement of the idea, one still would not have proof that he got the idea there. Chances are in the other direction, that he did not get the idea there, that he had it in his mind before and was touched by an artis tic expression of It because It was already familiar to him. Hawes' use of Sapience is to the point. He may have been in fluenced in some ways by the figure in the Court of Sapience, but it would be absurd to suppose that he had gone to church and had been exposed to scholastic ideas at school without being already perfectly familiar with the philosophical idea 84 she stands for and with her standard allegorical representa tion, Hawes, as a literary man, very likely read poetry, but it is much more certain that as a plain man and as a student he was beaten upon more strongly by current ideas from sources that were not primarily literary, The progress of the chief figures in the allegory usual ly shows his philosophical conclusions, and his passing ob servations, his moralistic ethics. The latter come often from the mouth of Discretion, Discretion appears at the beginning of the poem as his guide and mentor. She is the sister of Wisdom, or Sapience, who has an important place in the philo sophical allegory* She comes ultimately from Proverbs, where she is often connected with wisdom and made the guide of Oft young men, ° When she speaks it is in the proverbial strain, though not always with Proverbs as the source of her words. Often her wisdom is from the Bible, diluted by aphoristic ex pression. Avoid the sin of pride and forsake evil company,27 she says, with Proverbs; remember that this world is transi tory,^® she says in the spirit of Ecclesiastes; have patience in adversity,®® she counsels with Job; she advises him not to Oft For example: Proverbs 1:4, . . • • to young men, knowledge and discretion;'* 2:11, "discretion watch over thee, understanding keep thee ..." 27St. 65, 13. 28St. 13, 17. 29St. 63. be angry but to return fair words, and to avoid ill-advised speech,®^ like Jesus in His popular preaching. Some of her utterances show even more plainly the impression of the con temporary church: her warning regarding the sin against the •20 Holy Ghost, for instance, ^ and the plea to be reformed in reason.®** Again, her words are simply expedient advice and sound like a child’s copy book: Youth is told to respect the king,®4 love only where he is loved again,®5 believe no flat terers,®5 avoid meddling in others1 business.®*7 She ends her last speech with a series of moral epigrams, each beginning with the anaphoristic ”woe worth. • . ,** a figure which Wells says Hawes found in The Court of Sapience.®5 The four ladies who lived in the castle on the island, Nature, Fortune, Hardynesse, and Wysdome, together with Jus tice, are, with slight variation, in general accord with clas sic and scholastic schemes of psychology. For instance, he has only added fortune to Plato’s three estates in the Re public, and in both cases that harmony of the virtues is en forced by Justice. Wisdon and courage, as well as justice, were prominent Aristotelian valuesj and corresponding virtues for all of Hawes’ qualities, prudence, courage, temperance, -®°St. 13.. 31St. 62. ®®St. 65. ®4St. 14. ®6St. 16. ®7St. 61. ®2St. 57. ®5St. 15. ®8Supra, p. 82, N. 25 86 luck, and justice, reeeive much attention in post-Aristotelian writing like the Magna Moralia, Eudemean Ethics, and the trea tise On Virtues and Vices* For Thomas, wisdom was the first necessity of beatitude; and the intelligent contemplation of God, the final consummation for man. Courage and justice were two of his natural, as against the spiritual, virtues, and he allows a place for chance, contingency, or fate, as he vari ously calls Fortune. Discretion begs Youth to avoid blind- I ness of will; the union of knowledge and caritas, or the love of God, creates the right will, according to Thomas, and pro vides the way to beatitudes. Hawes comes even nearer to Pe- cock,39 the popular XVth Century interpreter of Thomas. M c cook’s four cardinal virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Dought iness, and Justice. These correspond to three of Hawes’, qualities, Sapience, Nature, and Hardynesse, but Pecock omits Fortune and adds Justice, which was the arbiter, outside the group, for Hawes. Like Thomas and Hawes, he gives preeminence to prudence; and of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost four are intellectual virtues: wisdom, intellect, council, and know ledge. But he says that Doughtiness opposes every viee, as Sloth opposes every virtue. Hawes does not grant courage a special place, but he is much concerned with the sin of sloth ) 39Ponet, Folewerv to the Donet, Reule of Cryaten Reli gion. Especiallylionet, Pt. II: Sec. 2. fulness as the adversary of the good life. After the debate of the four ladies before Justice, Youth in his search for his ideallady overcomes four evils. Being interpreted, these four, according to Hawe3* own careful explanation, are fleshly pleasure, love of riches, worldly "operacyon," and vanity. Youth prefers Clennes to fleshly pleasure, and heaven to riches; he is guided out of the maze of worldy business by Sapience, and over the frail bridge across the river Vanity by the encouragement of Clennes, Dis cretion, and Sapience. Now there is an unexpected parallel to this that must be more than coincidence. In the sermon that 40 Colet preached before the Bishops in 1512 the vices of the world are defined in practically the same terms. For "flesh ly pleasures," Colet has the lusts of the flesh or worldly pleasure; for the lady of riches on the elephant, he has cov etousness; for the maze of "busyness of worldly operacyon,” he has worldly occupations; for vanity, he has pride of power. The correspondence is almost perfect and must point to some common source in medieval or XVth Century sermon material, familiar to both Hawes and Colet The world, the flesh, and the devil, whom youth next meets, in the form of a dragon, were a familiar trinity in 4&Supra, p. 58. ^The source has not been uncovered. medieval literature, both popular and learned, 30 familiar and conventionalized that It Is hardly necessary to mention their literary antecedents. The real source^ and the most obvious and natural, for a conception of these evils, was the Church. The world, the flesh, and the devil separately often appear in the Bible as enemies of righteousness, but they are not linked together there. Instruction in the 3ins of these three realms was one of the duties of the parish priest, and in a well-regu lated parish it is probable that one would hear sermons there on several times a year. The specific instructions were that the parish priest was to preach on the seven sins, but these were popularly grouped under the three heads of the world, the flesh, and the devil.^ They were the evils which mon- asticism strained most against, and asceticism was still in the XVth Century the theoretical, and often the practical, ideal of the Church and churchmen. The popular devotional 4* books gave suggestions about overcoming these three, by prayer, almsgiving, and the Grace of God. Youth, it should be remembered, overcomes them by wisdom and force, not by righteousness and the redemptive power of Christ, a3 the men ^Compare Castle of Perserverance. ^Supra, p. 15, n 35. One of Pico*s poems gives twelve rules for overcoming the world, the fleshy and the devil. (English Works of Sir Thomas More, ojd. oft., I; 381-5.) of the early Reformation would have it, nor by the means of Graoe prescribed by the Church. In a couple of theological interludes,44 Hawes speaks directly without the "veil1 1 of the allegory, and outlines the process of salvation. The Son was incarnate, so that he might be our lord and brother. The strife that came about between man and God when man consented to sin can only be set at rest by man's asking mercy of our brother Christ. So may man have forgiveness and peace with heaven. There is almost no sug gestion here of the restitution idea of the ttCur Deus Homo,** except that Christ is mediator between man and the wrath of heaven. Neither is it AugustInian or Lutheran. The respon sibility is put upon man*s will to be saved; he must be peni tent and ask for mercy, and he will receive. This is essen tially Pecock,s position, that Christ does not make amends for man's sins but makes it possible, by providing a way of salvation, for man to save himself. After Youth has passed all of his trials he is united with his love, Clennes, who stands for Chastity, and he is supposed, then to have achieved the best state of life. Chas tity, as the ideal way of life, has, of course, an honorable 44St. 112-117 and 210 and 213. 45Pecock, Reule of Cryaten Religion, op. cit., treatise 2, chapters 18 and 21. 90 ecclesiastical tradition, The idea in the Church probably started with Paul,4:6 and was continued and fostered by patris tic writers. The pearl as thesymbol of virginity is a patris tic figure,4" 7 and continued in medieval literature, as well as in the writings and teachings of the Church. Chastity was the ideal life of churchmen and the religious, and even Colet considered marriage a concession unworthy of good men. The idea was definitely of the old-fashioned and conservative tradition, and the new ideal of the Renaissance was the well- rounded life. The union of Youth and Chastity, however, is not the final achievement. After their death they experience the ^solacyous1 * garden in heaven, like Origen’s divine Canaan, a fulfillment of the promise of paradise in the earthly garden of Clennes. Finally, they desire the beauty of Cod and the joy of eternally contemplating His nature. The bliss or be atitude of heaven is the opportunity to look upon God forever. When they had had this bliss they were really joined in mar riage and their lives consummated. The end, like many of the ideal means in the life of Youth, is in harmony with Thomas. To know God, Thomas says, is the end of intelligent sub stance; the ultimate happiness of man is not in carnal pleas 4®For example, I Corinthians 7:6-9, 25-28. 4r7Margarite, of St. 235. ure, honor, glory, wealth, power, goods of the body and the sense, or even in moral virtue, prudence, or art, but in the contemplation of God and the perfect cognition of Truth. Man cannot understand God in mortal life, so his perfect happi ness is after death, in his vision of God. Knowledge, love, and will are the means to beatitude.^® Prom.one point of view, this pattern is the plan for The Example of Virtue. With his love for Clennes, and with the sisters Sapience and Discretion as his guides, he strives constantly for the good life. He learns the value of the natural virtues courage, knowledge, nature,, and fate, and overcomes the temptation to be diverted by carnal pleasures, honor, wealth, and worldly affaire. He does not stop when his name has been changed to Virtue, after his conquest of the World, the 5’ lesh, and the Devil, but continues his struggle for beatitude. He finally realizes it in the sight of God. Not every one of the figures is the exact counterpart of Thomas* qualities, but the general resemblance is close enough to make it plain that Hawes is following the Thomasian way of life, however diluted and sty lized by much popular handling. i • < It was probably Duns Scotus rather than Thomas Aquinas who was 'being studied most in the universities at the end of the XVth Century, and whom it was then the fashion for the re- 48Contra Gentiles,- III: 25-51; Summa Theologica, I: 26. 92 actionary academic and ecclesiastical scholars to follow* Thomas was somewhat out of date in the schools. But the in fluence of his modes of thought was felt in the popularly understood beliefs and practices of the Church. The doc trines as they were accepted by the layman seem to be what Hawes drew on for The Example. He had gone to Oxford before he wrote it, but still it is the product of his early experi ence. The plan incubated in his mind, perhaps, when he was very young, when he had not been influenced by the university or by London beyond, and when he finally came to write he still cast his thought in the old and familiar mold. There are suggestions of later accretions of thought, as we shall see, in his softened view of the role of Christ in redemp tion, for example, and in the resemblance of certain aspects of the love story to Platonic ideas, but these can almost be overlooked in the general view without injuring the integrity of the sweep of ideas as a whole. CHAPTER II THE PASTIME OP PLEASURE The Pastime of Pleasure is HawesTbest known poem and the most pretentious, Wynkyn de Worde's note following the table of contents in the 1517 edition1 states that the poem was made by "Stephen Hawes, one of the groomes of the most honorable chambre of our souerayne lorde kynge Henry the seu- eth, the XXI yere of his most noble reign. " The twenty-first year of his reign puts the date of composition at 1506, In this year the King's expense accounts indicate that Hawes was paid ten shillings for a ballet which may have been The Pas time of Pleasure, Wynkyn de Worde published it twice, in 1509 and in 1517, John Wayland in 1554, and Tottel and Wolsey severally, in 1555* Prom the number of the editions it will appear that the poem was popular in the first half of the XVIth Century* Hawes wrote The Pastime of Pleasure when he was thirty years old, If the dates we have decided upon for his life are right. He had been living in London probably for four or five years, and presumably knew the life of the court and the city fairly well. He had had the experience of writing at least one poem and, since his first essay was fairly success- J-The Mead edition for the E. E. T. S. uses the 1517 ed 94 ful, lie wrote in the same pattern in his second long poem. However, the second poem shows much different experience in ideas. Instead of medieval theology we find scholasticism, and, supplementing that, evidences of eontact with the ideas of the Renaissance. The poem is an expression of the influ ence upon him of the university, and of the exponents of the Hew Learning whom he may have known at Oxford, and more cer tainly knew in London. The sources of The Pastime of Pleasure have heen worked out more carefully than those of any other of his poems. The Cambridge History suggests the Old Testament, the writings of the schoolmen and the saints, text books of the trivium and quadrivium, allegorical writings of the Middle Ages, like the Roman de la Rose, Troilu3 and Criseyde, Confession Amantis, Temple of Glass, and Court of Sapience, and Martianus Capel- lafs Satyricon. These are general enough, and could serve as sources for almost any long poem of the XVth Century. Courthope concurs in Capella and Lydgate, stresses as well the courtly love literature, and suggests that it might have been stimulated by-Caxton*s printing of Morte D 1Arthur. Mead® ^W. A. Courthope, History of English Poetry, London, 1897, Is 380-82. 3 Introduction to his edition, op. cit. and Hatter4 find Reisch’s Margarita Philosophies the moat In fluential source for the liberal arta section, and Wells traces many parallels between the Court of Sapience, The Ex- ample, and The Pastime, as we have seen. Burkhart considers the Court the chief source, and Berdan and Murrison in the Cambridge History also find it important. Miss Hammond is un convinced by the evidence for Reisch and sees only an influ ence in vocabulary from the Court. Prom Chaucer and Lydgate come details and tricks but not plan nor vocabulary. Hawes used Caxton’s Recuyell and his Mirror of the World, and Dona tos’ Ars Grammatica Minor.^ Rhodinger believes the Pelerin- 7 age de la Vie Humaine to be Hawes’ chief influence. Most of these sources are literary, it should be no ticed, and it is not my purpose to verify literary sources, except as they are the sources for philosophical ideas in Hawes. Where there is no Renaissance influence no attempt will be made to go into details about sources. Like The Example of Virtue, The Pastime of Pleasure is a moral allegory based on chivalry. It has been observed a 4Whitney Wells, ’ ’Stephen Hawes and The Court of Sapi ence.” Rev, of Eng. St., July, 1950, pp. £64-94. 5Supra, p. 8§. eE. P. Hammond, English Verse Between Chaucer and Sur rey, Duke Univ., Durham," No. Car,, 1967, pp. 268-*70. 7Wells, op. cit•, pp. 284-94. 96 good many times tliat it followed The Example in plan and is an enlargement of the earlier poem. The hero, taking the route of the active life, and accompanied by two hounds, Grace and Governance, sets out toward the castle of La Belli Pucel, who is ideally good, beautiful, and wise. On his way he passes the abode of Doctrine and the Seven Liberal Arts, and he stops at each to learn what they have to teach him. He studies the seven arts, with emphasis on rhetoric, and finds their meta physical meanings. After he gained knowledge, and under the inspiration of his love for Pucel, he proceeds to the castle devoted to chivalry and knighthood. Finally, he pits himself against two giants that oppose love, and attains his Pucel. After a long life of fame and worldly success, he is overcome by death. Death is overcome by fame, fame by time, and time by eternity. This is the general movement of the poem, and the next few pages will be devoted to a consideration of the literal content in more detail. As in The Example Hawes begins with an indictment of Q sloth, commending the king for avoiding it. Then he con siders the rhetorical problem already discussed, of cloaking Q the real meaning beneath allegory or fable. This ends the introduction, and he begins the poem itself with a meadow for a setting, described in astrological terms, with Zephyrus and 8Lines 7-84 9L1. 84-54 97 Flora present, and also, In plain English, nfloures tendre” and aromatic odors. Here, Grand Amour, the hero, comes upon a finger post, one side of which points to the contemplative life, wherein one renounces vainglory, and the other to the active life, the way of worldly dignity, fame, and La Bell Pucel. He chooses the road leading to the active life and follows it till evening. Then he sleeps. Most of the rest i o of the poem is a vision.* lAlhen he awakes he sees a statue pointing the way to the tower of Doctrine, and he is inspired with the necessity of inclining his heart ' c g j , the reasonable life, with the head governing the body. In answer to hi3 need, two hounds, Grace and Governance, fawn upon him, and thereafter follow him 11 throughout his journey. Then he meets fame, who advises him to follow the example of people in the Golden Age and to do deeds for the common weal so that he may be well remem bered. ^ He hears as well about La Bell Pucel, who dwells in a paradisiac garden and is beautiful, wise, virtuous, and noble beyond all others. He loves her by report and decides to seek her. Fame advises him to proceed by way of Doctrine and the seven arts. So he sets out, accompanied by his hounds.13 10L1. 52-134. 12L1. 134-191. X1L1. 191-240. 13L1. 241-315. He passes among craggy rocks and singing birds to the tower of Doctrine, by whomhe is sent to grammar. Grammar says that she is the original of all sciences, and teaches man to speak and write correctly, to avoid idleness, and to subdue the flesh. It is the original metaphysics, too, for God made the world with a word. Grand Amour is advised to start with the Donet. N e x t he goes to Logic, who teaohes man to dis cern the false from the true and to use his intelligence to 1 R make right choices. ° Prom Logie he goes to Rhetoric, and begs her to clear away the mist of ignorance for him. Rhetoric is considered under five divisions: invention, which teaches one how to choose his material; disposition, by which one divides the material into a beginning, middle, and end; elocution, which determines choice of words and modes of expression; pronun ciation, which shows people how to deliver their ideas to hearers; memory, which helps the speaker to keep his story or discourse In mind, through * imagery or through moral con clusions. This discussion Is interrupted for words upon the use of cloudy figures, for admonitions against sloth, avarice, and ignorance, and for praise of knowledge and of the moral value of poetry. After an apostrophe to his thoughtful heart, troubled 14L1. 337-587. 15L1. 622-637. 16L1. 678-1302. 99 on the stormy sea of Ignorance, he ends his ars poetica with a 1 *7 list of favorite poets and their works,x ' men who became famous by overcoming sloth. Chief among them is Lydgate, whose true example he follows in preference to the learned but unwise moderns, who waste their time on unprofitable love bal lads.^® He then begins his course in the quadrivium and goes to Arithmetic. Arithmetic, like Grammar, he calls the basis - of all science, but he is not specific about subject matter. The study of arithmetic seems to mean to him the understand ing of the "perfect” numbers on the walls of the house; his emphasis is always on the mystic value of numbers, not on processes.* He continues to the tower of Music, and there he sees La Bell Pucel and is ravished by her earthly beauty. When she goes away, he relieves his sadness by a conversation with Music. Music, he learns, is always in accord with reason and creates harmony out of discordant things. It unifies the seven sciences and leads by perfect doctrine to celestial joy J ^The list includes Moral Gower; Chaucer (House of Fame, Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, Canterbury Tales); Lydgate, monk of Bury (Conversation of Mary, Life of St.. Ed munds, Fall of Princes, teaching us to despise this world full of mutability, Court of Sapience, Seige of Thebes, where in a city is brought low by woman, The Chorl and the~“Bird, Temple of Glass).~ LI. 1317-1365. 18L1. 1317-1407. 19L1. 1413-1456. 100 and eternity. It brings health to the sick body and the de ranged soul and sharpens the mind, gladdens the heart, and 20 provides rest after study. Next comes an interlude in his studies. He plains of his woe in not enjoying the earthly love of Pucel, and finds a friend, Gouncil, with whom he can share his troubles. He tells Council his story In courtly love convention: he re counts his lover’s pains, complains of his hard lot, empha sizes secrecy, and compares her to classical ladles. Council promises to heal him by reason and argues with him about his passion: one must take the pain with the pleasure, and must suffer to deserve the love to come. She will yield and re ward his pains, Council says. Though Grand Amour is of humble birth, she has riches and nobility enough for both.2^ - He and Council leave the temple, where this conversa tion has been held, and return to the tower of Music. He meets Pucel again, and they go to a garden whose porteress is Courtesy. The shrubbery in the garden is cut like lions, dragons, and other creatures; there are flowers made by Flora, and a gold and azure fountain, also made like a dragon. In the midst of the garden sits Pucel in a velvet gown, her hair down, plaiting a wreath. They talk together in a sort of con test of wits. She presents objections and he tries to answer 20L1. 1457-1584 21L1. 1584-1960 101 them, but she finally yields, not because he has convinced her intellectually but because she is in love with him. But she tells him he must come to her through many dangers, and he re joices. They part, and she sails off in a ship. He returns to the company of Council, who recommends courage and wisdom to him, and advises him to study geometry, astronomy and chiv alry. Geometry, to whom Grand Amour goes first, claims impor tance because of ability to measure astronomical distances.22 Further, he is able to measure all things, and stands for the "mean," the moderation that is "the ground of excellence*1 and the lode star of all grace. Still under the inspiration of his lady, Amour takes up his journey again and goes to Astro nomy. She says hers' is the last of the seven sciences be cause it sets everything in order by reason. God is the greatest astronomer, and made the heavens and the earth and put the stars in their places.25 The discussion of the creation leads to a discussion of psychology. There are five outward wits and five inward wits, Grand Amour learns. He is instructed in them at length, with the suggestion that the matter is all to be found in Plato, but is very obscure. "Nature naturynge'* made the stars, which influence man but are dependent on the will of 22L1. 1975-2485. 23L1. 2570-2780. 102: God. The vegetative, sensitive, and intellective souls are touched upon, but one is recommended to Latin authors for fur ther light.^ After receiving the instruction of the seven arts, Grand Amour is licensed to go to chivalry. He continues on his journey, urged on by the love of his lady, with Attendance as his valet, and his two hounds. He goes over hill and val ley on a thorny road and comes finally to a flowery plain. In the midst of the plain stands a steel tower decorated with gargoyles and turrets. He is admitted by the Porter, Stead fastness, to renew the long-decayed flower of chivalry.^5 In the temple of Mars he hears a long discourse by twofaced For tune on the mutability of human life and the connection of the power of fortune with God’s predestination. But Mars adds that Fortune is only a poetic figure to express the changing state of man. Grand Amour promises to love truth, Minerva teaches him the art of warfare, Mylyzyus instructs him in the purposes of knighthood, and he is armed with the armor of Paul. He sets out as a knight, with Attendance and the hounds and a company of older knights named for the virtues pfi necessary to him. ° They spend the night in a wilderness of hills and darkness, and In the morning he encounters Godfrey Gobylyve. Godfrey believes that women are the representatives of the 24L1. 1975-2485. 25L1. 2913-2997. 26L1. 3018-3451. 103 devil and says so in vivid manner. Amour reviews the Gourse of his love at the temple of Venus. Venus writes a letter to Pugs! explaining that beauty is to inspire love and procrea tion, and urging her to marry Amour for love# Grand Amour on sets out with Venus* blessing. ' On his way he meets with Godfrey again, and Godfrey repeats that women are unstable. For this impiety he is whipped by Chastity and taken to the House of Correction to be shown the three levels of punish ment for unfaithful lovers.88 Amour rides on through increasingly wild and bizarre country, and comes to a well with a shield and horn beside it. He winds the horn, and a giant appears, with three heads, enemies to love. They fight, and Amour, inspired by Pucel, wins with his sword Clara Prudence. He receives encourage ment from emissaries of his lady, and he goes on to meet a seven-headed giant. He meets seven virtues, antithetical to the seven vices of the giant, and all ride on through a dark wilderness full of wild beasts. Within sight of the castle of Pucel, he is called upon to face a dragon made of seven metals by the sorcery of Disdain and Strangeness, whose coun sel Pucel had scorned. With the help of Pallas he overcomes the monster under a craggy rock and climbs to the castle.89 27L1. 3459-4105. 28l1. 4105-4260. 29l1. 4921-5186. 104 He meets Pucel, and they are married. He lives to rich and famous maturity and to old age. Finally death comes. He dies repentant and at peace with the Church, and is huried with an epitaph on the seven deadly sins. For the end of all Joy and prosperity is death, and ”... .though the day be never so long At last the bell ryngeth to even songe.” Fame promises to make him remembered in spite of death. But time, the lode star of eternity, under the aspect of which God sees past, present, and future as a unity, overcomes fame. After him, in turn, comes eternity, with the advice that if one would spend eternity in joy he should spend time in vir tue. The poet prays for Mary*s intercession in overcoming the world, the flesh, and the devil, and excuses his indiffer ent metrics and moral achievements. The poem dwindles to a 'SCfY close with praise of Lydgate. Like The Example, The Pastime, is a carefully con structed allegory. There are many morality characters and unvitalized abstractions; and most individual situations, as well as the whole plan of the poem, are artificially, not artistically, determined. But the personality of the prin cipal characters, especially the lovers and Godfrey Gobylyve, fuse more successfully with the ideas they represent than in the other poem. 50L1. 5186-5796. 105 The purpose of Grand Amour's life is the attainment of r» an ideal beauty, which is also ideal goodness and wisdom. He gains it through the study of the seven arts and through chiv alry. The intellectual discipline of this study and of the advice of Council serves to subdue the flesh, and his love keeps him to his purpose. Part of the poem is not allegory at all, but courtly love. And part again is direct discussion of technical or metaphysical problems of the seven arts, usually spoken by the personified arts, respectively. In the same way, the burlesque and living character of Godfrey is forced into the figurative House of Correction, protesting and rebellious. The most purely allegorical situations are Amour*s combats wlth~the two giants and with the metal dragon. The meaningful heads of the dragon with the balancing virtues in the form of maidens, the seven metals of the dragon, the Christian armor of Amour, and the ointment of Pallas are in tellectually worked out and have ethical but not artistic life. Here it is the scenery that intrudes into the alle gorical unreality. After he attains his lady she inclines to crumble and be forgotten as a figure of ideal wisdom, goodness, and beauty. Amour grows old and rich, and finally dies in the protection df the Church, like any middle class burgher, and we are left with the problem of Time and Eter nity. The Pastime of Pleasure is a confusion of many influ- 106 ences and many schools of thought. It was written while Hawes was still feeling the force of new ideas in London, and these new forms of thought combined strangely with the old. In gen eral there are three types of sources from which he took his ideas: the medieval romance, from which he gets the quest as the frame of the poem and the trappings of chivalry and gi ants; scholastic learning, from which he gets the liberal arts as the means to his heroes purpose, and a few theologi cal touches; the new learning of Italy, which gives him the Platonism of his ideal of beauty as the goal of Amour. The plan of this poem, like The Example of Virtue, is taken from the romance quest, and from the vision. The hero in a dream seeks his heartTs desire, and, after multifarious adventure, attains it. The quest in The Pastime is unusual because It is a search for a way of life and an idea rather than for a physical goal, and the difficulties are moral and intellectual. The frequent pictures of the knight with squire, hounds, and horse, traversing a dreary plain or wild vale, are conventional romance situations, although they of ten have a life of their own and are seldom dull. The giants with multiple heads and the metal dragon are familiar ro mance properties, though the latter has somewhat the same as pect as Daniels image with feet of clay. Likewise, the temples of Mars and Venus follow the medieval tradition of those classical figures, and when he 107 enters the castle or Chivalry he does so with the conscious purpose of renewing the decaying flower of chivalry. There is nothing realistically feudal about the theory of knighthood Amour is called upon to embrace. He is knighted to defend the weak, to uphold the common weal, and to support Justice and truth, not by arms at all, but, according to the allegory, 31 by the strength of wisdom and tinder the protection of the Christian virtues.32 The love scenes, in which Amour composes complaints to his lady, the scene of their meeting in the garden, and his experiences in the temple of Venus, have about them much of the element of courtly love. How much of his love is eourtly and how much is Petrarchan and Platonic will later be disen tangled in some measure, but it is enough to say now that the courtly love idea is present. The other side of the pattern is seen in the fabliau character of Godfrey, who embodies both common and realistic vulgarity, and ecclesiastical sa tire of “mulier garrula et vaga.” All of this medieval machinery that forms the frame work of the poem is literary tradition. The quest and vision form and the three-headed giant appear in The Example as well, and much else in The Example comes from the Court of 3^His sword, Clara Prudence. 32The armor of St. Paul. 108 Sapience, as we have seen. But the influence of medieval lit erature is stronger in The Pastime than in the former poem. Wynkyn de Worde’s reprints of Caxton’s editions of the Can terbury Tales and the Morte D*Arthur, for instance, had re cently made popular, old-fashioned literature more easily accessible, and Hawes, after being established in London, had more leisure to read. So, for its form and its ideas, The Pastime depends much upon XVth Century semi-popular poetry and recent printed editions of earlier tales. The scholastic matter is the chief meat of the poem. The seven arts, which Hawes considers to constitute true doc trine, were even at the end of the XVth Century the basis of the university education. It is true, of course, that Hawes, except in the case of rhetoric, does not treat them as sober university courses. But he is writing a poem, not a prospec tus for a liberal arts course, and, even as it is, he deals with subject matter much more than pleases his critics. Mead says that he get3 the material for his treatment of the seven arts from Gregorius Reisch, but Miss Hammond is not convinced of this.53 It Is not our place to settle this question, be cause in any case it is medieval material. But it should be said that there is always the possibility that he got his ideas about the liberal arts by studying them. He suggests 35Supra, p. 95. 34 the Donet as a good text for the beginner in grammar, A metaphysical and religious interpretation of Donatus was made by Gerson at the beginning of the XVth Century which might have suggested his own Johanine idea about the creation of the world from a word, the subject matter of grammar. He empha sizes rhetoric beyond all the other arts, conceivably because the study of rhetoric was the fashion in Italy and was coming to be in England, His treatment of arithmetic is metaphysi cal,^ like the Boethian texts still in fashion in Hawes day.36 He gives music Pythagorean values for healing and bringing harmony out of discordance, f but his special in terest and stress on its importance he shares with More and others of his contemporaries.3® He shares with Pico and Colet his interest in the creation,3^ although the direct Timaean influence in Hawes is slight. It is not improbable, then, that at least part of the discussion of the seven arts came from his own experience at school and university. Many details, as well as the general conception of the whole poem, are taken, probably, from popular scholastic 34L1. 578 35L1. 1429-56. 3®EarIiest Arithmetics in English, edited by Robert Steele for the E. hr . T. S., #118, 1022, prints two transla tions, from Alexander and from Sacrabosco, before 1500, which describe processes and methods of computation a great deal more mature than any suggestion of Hawesr arithmetical ideas. 37L1. 1535-85. 38Potter, 0£. cit., p.16. 39L1. 2692 ff. 110 sources. As in The Example, the trinity, wisdom, courage, and love, play an important part, and Amour1s attempt to attain these virtues determines the outline for the poem. The head is to rule the hody, in the Thomasian fashion. The hero is led by the hounds, Grace and Governance, which remind one of Thomas’ two virtues, self-control and grace. The five inward and five outward wits of Aristotle and of Pecock, with stress also on common wit, appear in Hawes’ psychology$ and he in cludes three of the several souls of the De Anima, Summa Con tra Gentiles, and the Donet. Many of the individual virtues common to Aristotle and Thomas appear in The Pastime; stead fastness, friendliness, the mean, temperance, liberality, courtesy. However, the whole problem of the relation of Aristotle, Thomas, and Pecock^0 is reserved for later treat ment. It is enough to say here that Hawes seems to know his Aristotle at second or third hand. Finally the third general source for the poem is the new and aetive thought of his contemporaries. Just where scholasticism ends and humanism-begins is our real problem but it is possible to draw a few general conclusions now. Both in detail and in general conception, humanism and the humanists are felt. Grand Amour’s early choice of the active against the contemplative life is the typical decision of ^°These two are taken as typical treatments of Aristotle. Ill Hawes * contemporaries. Hawes ends with an excursion through Time and Eternity, like Origen41 and Thomas,42 hut also like More himself, in the latter*s poem on his father's tapestries. The figure of Pucel as the ideal of beauty, and of wis dom and goodness, is ultimately Platonic, although Hawes prob ably found her by the devious route of Ficino and Plotinus, with suggestions from Petrarch and Marie de France. Love is an aspiration after ideal beauty, and the courtly experience of beauty lights the way to the celestial. Grand Amour de velops a many-sided personality, like the Renaissance ideal of versatility, and may be compared in some respects to the courtiers then famous in Italy and at the English court. His interests are physical, intellectual, artistic, moral, but not theological. His education is for life, not salvation. He is interested in fame, which the Church taught should be scorned. If the machinery of the poem is from the romance, and most of the matter from scholasticism, the tone of the poem and its moral conclusions are humanistic.4^ Hawes seems to be shaping the material of his youthful and university read- 41Bigg, 0£. cit., p. 269. 42Summa Contra Gentiles, IV: 97. 43A conclusion is given without much evidence because the display of evidence is the function of Part III. 112 Ing and experience into the mould of contemporary attitudes and ideas that he was learning to know in London. CHAPTER III THE CONVERSION OP SWEARERS The Pastime of Pleasure Hawes undoubtedly felt to be him most important work* His other works are short and un pretentious by comparison. "The Joyful Meditation0 appears in complete copies of Wynkyn de Worde's 1509 edition of "The Conversion of Swearers," and "The Consolation of Lovers" was published in 1512. It Is now practically inaccessible, the one copy being In the hands of a private collector. The other minor poem available to us is "The Conversion of Swear ers," available in Southern California in two copies at the Huntington Library. Wynkyn de Worde*s edition of 1509 is incomplete, lacking the first sheet. The colophon assigns the poem to "Stephen Hawys,” with the familiar identifying formula "groome of the chambre of our souerigne lorde and Kyng- Henry the seventh." The date is 1509, the first year of the reign of Henry VIII, and it is dedicated to "the most excellent prynses, my lady the kynges grandame." This edition should contain also "The Joyful Meditation," but the copy is imperfect. The other edition is complete, printed by Johan Butler, but with no date.-1 * **The Huntington Library has The Conuersyon ofSwerers (incomplete). . . Emprynted 114 There Is no Information regarding the date of "The Conversion of Swearers," except that it is prior to 1509, when it was printed. The maturity of the metrical experi ment, and the religious ideas, which are in sympathy with contemporary reformers, suggest that it was written later than The Pastime, perhaps sometime in the interval between the publishing of that poem and 1509. As the first decade of the century advanced, it is safe to say that the liberal ideas of Colet, More, and Eras mus, especially, became more and more important in London, and representative of general intellectual attitudes toward religion* It seems not unreasonable to suppose that Hawes knew these men and others in court and London society who were interested in serious things, or at least, that he had some acquaintance with their ideas. Just as their earlier humanism makes itself felt in The Pastime, so their zeal for religion and reformative ideas begins to influence him in "The Conversion." Both The Example and The Pastime were written with a purpose aside from beauty, but the didactic purpose was at least veiled by the artistic decoration of story, setting, at London. . . by Wynkyn de Worde. • • 1509. 61309. The Conuercyon of Swerers. Colophon: Imprynted at London. • . by me Johan Butler. (1530?) 61308 R 209592 The colophon from which the quotation was taken is found in this 1509 edition. 115 and allegory. But in HThe Conversion” there is no allegory and no covering at all for the didacticism. The first eight stanzas show frankly that the justification for poetry is a purpose to teach and f,to followe the trace of truth and ryghtwysnes.K The purpose is directly expressed and una dorned. It is Christ's personal appeal to a sinful world to repent and mend, especially regarding the sin of swearing. But because of the singleness of purpose, the didacticism and the emotion fuse more satisfyingly here than in the other poems, perhaps• Christ makes llis appeal in the next few stanzas es pecially to the rulers, who, He says, owe their dominion to him. They are asked to set a good example themselves, and to do all in their power to reform their courtiers. Through the middle of the poem, Hawes forgets that he Is addressing the lords especially and speaks to every one. But he returns to the idea again at the end, begging them to exhort their servants, and commends his book to the mercy of the sover eign. He adds apologetically that he wrote the poem just to eschew idleness. The poem is partly a theological argument and partly the personal plea of Christ for righteousness. Christ has taken upon Himself the sins of mankixld, nand as a lambe moost mekely dyde enclyne to suffre the deathe for your re- 116 dempcyon,H^ the theological argument runs, and still men let him be rent by their swearing. He has saved men from the devil once and would again, he has made heaven a glorious place and has bought this glory for the world, and still it % returns to the devil. Here Hawes interrupts his theology with a metrical ex periment. He begins with one word lines riming in triplets, and a fourth riming with the eighth, and so forth. He ex pands the line syllable by syllable to 3ix syllables and re duces it again the same way to one syllable, making eleven groups of four lines each. He insists sensuously upon the wounds of Christ and pleads that they should not be made worse by men’s swearing.^ Hext he admonishes the reader against the snares of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Christ grants grace to subdue these enemies if one will only accept it: n....to do good or yll _ All is at thy lyberte."- Then follows the first of the Latin insertions, this time the Vulgate statement of the commandment against swearing, from the twentieth chapter of Exodus,6 with free translation. But. ^Stanzas 9,.10. ^St. 15, 16. ^Following St. 16. 5St. 17, 18. ^St. 19, 20: Exodi vicesimo. Non acciples nomen dei tui in vanum. 117 he hastens to add that the commandment does not mean that one may not meekly use His name ”to give the good credence.” He is angered when men swear by Him falsely, because Me is very T 1 true. He returns to the idea of obedience, and says in ef fect ”if ye loved me ye would keep ray commandments.”8 Ho one loved man so much as He who became man and suffered death to redeem him.® He repeats for the second time the plea to be converted lest He take vengeance. He quotes Ecclesiastes 33, which does not exist, to the effect that ”often a man, swearing, is filled with iniquity, and misfortune does not depart from his house.” He follows this with a passage from Augustine about holy living and holy dying: those who live well die well, and those who live ill are well deadj therefore one must amend his life.10 Hot only the Bible and the Fathers, but Christ’s prelates preach repentance, but men’s hearts are too hard to be touched by any of them.11 Here follows groups of four stanzas each, one of woes I p and one of beatitudes. ^ Woe worth pride, envy, sloth, glu- ?St. 20, 21. 8st# 21. °St. 23. 10St. 24-26. Hawes quotes Ecclesiastes and Augustine in Latin. 11St. 27. The summaries of this and following stanzas are free paraphrases of the text. 12St. 28-31, 32-35. 118 tony, lechery, covetyse, short joy, and pleasure in mortal sin. Woe worth those who forsake Christ and willingly of fend, who swear and amend not. On the other hand, blessed are those who love humility, truth, patience, works of "equity,” abstinence, virtue, who eschew the world and re main virgins. Blessed are they, too, that prefer heavenly joys to earthly, reprove pleasures and remember Christ's suf fering, and that follow His example to teach the wicked. The seven sins and seven virtues are liberally represented, it will be observed, and the otherworldly attitude is praised. 13 The next four stanzas are devoted to more praise of otherworldliness. If one takes great pains to withstand the world, the flesh, and the devil he will attain to joy. For who is a greater fool than he who enjoys the pleasures of the world for a season, but has everlasting pain? And #10 is wiser than he who accepts the pain of the world, that he may see Christ in eternity? One is wise to regard no joy of this transitory earth, but to hear the words of Christ, who loves men though they hate Him. He returns to theology again to observe that Mercy and Peace reconcile Christ and man, but that truth and righteous ness make it necessary for Christ to take vengeance if men do not cease swearing.By His suffering Christ has sealed 13St. 36-40. *4St. 41, 42 119 man»s salvation, but by his swearing man breaks the seal and opens the wounds again. He ends with a plea to men to 1 1 come unto me and cast your synnes adowne,” to avoid His vengeance^ The relation of °The Conversion” to contemporary think ing must be considered carefully later, but the poem may be placed in a general way now. It is a confusion of new and old ideas and attitudes, and this confusion is not surprising in a time of transition. The confusion is evident in the aim of the poem. The purpose for the reader is to instruct, and for Hawes himself, overtly, to keep himself from idleness. However, really he hoped to gain the favorable attention of the king by his efforts. The sin of swearing with which the poem chiefly deals, has, of course, one of the Ten Gommandments against it, and it was a favorite prohibition in the XVth Century. False swearing was one of the popular subjects of medieval ser mons,^® and Peeock considers it the chief sin to be avoided.^ The evil of swearing seems to be a superficial thing to re ceive so much attention, but it may have been especially prevalent and especially conspicuous in the XVth Century. Then, it is a very safe sin to attack, touching no dangerous 15St. 43-45. * - 60ust, Cambridge, 1930, p. 415. l7Ponet, II: 6. 120 political or economic problems. Originally the objection to it may have been on a philosophical basis, because false swearing, as Pecock suggests, destroys truth and reverence for God. The sensuous portrayal of Christ’s suffering on the cross in the inserted metrical experiment and elsewhere, is like the poems of Pico della Mirandola, translated by More, i'his sentimental, sensuous, and personal attitude is present also, however, in earlier poetry, in Occleve’s poems to the Virgin, for example,*-® which are very little touched by the Renaissance. In the same way, the four stanzas of beatitudes, and the four of woes, are reminiscent of earlier poetry*-9 and of the seven sins and seven virtues. But they are originally, V. and possibly even directly, derived from the Gospels, from the words of Christ: the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, and the seven woes over Jerusalem in Matthew 23. Several important and controversial problems of theo logy are touched upon In the poem, which must be considered in details later because they really show best the degree of influence of the Reformation on Hawes. Christ takes man's sins upon him, sad dies to save him from the devil.. This is *-8,,Compleynte to the Virgin,” for example, in Furni- vall's edition. !9por example, in The Court of Sapience. 121 a doctrine of vicarious suffering, refined from the idea of Christ's sacrifice to satisfy Cod's desire for vengeance, and, in general, this attitude is more characteristic of the early Reformation, than the more sanguine medieval idea. Again, in regard to free will, man is free to accept the means of grace open to him, if he choose, but these means of grace are in the power of Christ to grant, so redemption is in that degree prescribed and determined. This is essen tially the attitude of Colet and his followers, as will be seen. But he adds, in the spirit of the medieval preaeher and of Jonathan Edwards, that if man is not prompt to repent, Christ will take swift vengeance, and that Truth and Right eousness will assert themselves against Mercy and Peace, and overset the balance among the daughters of God. In spite of the prevalence of pre-Reformation ideas in the poem, it has still a Reformation flavor. The direct appeal of Christ to men, without a mediate personality, the power of the love of Christ in achieving righteousness, and the importance of Christ's example as a pattern to conduct, are in harmony with the ideas of contemporary progressive religious thinkers like Colet and More. The poem shows In spirit, at least, the~influence of the Reformation. Without much qualification, generalizations, especi ally if they are particularly pat and neat, are likely to to be false. But it is convenient and revealing to notice, 122 as has been suggested, that the three poems show character istic ideas and distinct periods in Hawes* education. The Example was written when Hawes first came to London, before he was much influenced by life there. It is old-fashioned and theological, and he goes back to this early ethical and religious experiences, even before college, for his material. The Pastime show3, most of all the poems, his interest in the new learning and is most humanistic. He is drawing upon his intellectual experiences at Oxford, and in London afterward. t tThe Conversion of Swearers'* came under the influence of the Oxford humanists, whose own attitudes were shifting, in Lon don, away from humanism and over to a reformed and reforming religion. It Is a mistake to suppose that Hawes was ever a humanist or a reformer with knowledge or enthusiasm of Colet or Erasmus or More, but it seems certain that he was not un affected by their ideas. The next thing is to determine in detail what influence Renaissance ideas had upon him. PART III - THE RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE CHAPTER I THE ARISTOTELIAN PROBLEM IN HAWES We have seen that it is probable that Stephen Hawes spent his adolescent years at Oxford in the 90*s and his adult years in London during the first years of the new century. We cannot speak more definitely about his life and refrain from conjecture, and even so definite a statement about dates is partly conjectural. But this much makes it possible for us to say that he lived at a time when the intellectual life of England was beginning to be stirred by the New Learning. He could hardly have been at Oxford during those years without being exposed to the new ideas and the new facts brought by fellow students and teachers from Italy. He could hardly have lived in London and near the court In the years follow ing usi thout contact of some sort with these same humanists. At least, then, he had the opportunity to absorb humanistic and reformative ideas. His poetry shows creditable though pedestrian intelligence, and he had a reputation for learning. So, since he had an alert mind and an environment of human istic ideas, the inference is that he was influenced by the Renaissance. Indeed, his works on superficial view have 1S4 shown suggestions of such influence. Remaining is the problem of proof. Hawes' poems will be considered in the light of the three chief philosophical problems of the Renaissance, which were Aristotelianism, Pla tonism, and religion, and the attempt will be made to deter mine whether his attitudes are typical of Renaissance atti tudes on each of these questions. Then philosophical ideas typical of the Renaissance and in Hawes will be indicated that grew out of contemporary attitudes toward practical and active life, and did not come from former philosophy. The first section will be devoted to Hawes' Aristotelianism, and his discussion of rhetoric will be first considered. The text and context of Aristotle had suffered varied fortunes in the Middle Ages. Before the Xlth-Century, he was known best to Arabian scholars and hardly at all in the West. Abelard studied Aristotle and appreciated Hellenism, but he was disowned by the Church. The first notice of Aristotle by Western scholars had to be through Arabian versions because they were the only texts available. However, in the Xlllth Century, there was a renaissance of intellectual life in gen eral in Europe, and along with it came a curiosity about Aristotle. Translations, for example, from the commentaries of the Persian Avicenna and from the Moorish Averoes, were followed by the investigation of the Greek text. Robert Grosseteste in England studied and translated into Latin the 125 Hich.omach.ean Ethics, and other scholars worked in Spain, Neth erlands, and Italy. At first the Church remained opposed to Aristotle because he attacked Platonic realism and other of itat accepted attitudes. But gradually it ceased actively to raise arms against the Aristotelian commentators, and even tually it embraced Aristotle as its official philosopher. After the great systems of Thomas, Occam, and Scotus had de veloped, however, Aristotle was forgotten again for the most part, and only the commentaries and summaries were remembered. One of the signs of the Renaissance was the revived interest, first In Italy, in the real Aristotle. The current opposition to scholasticism and its distortion of Aristotle, and the desire to present a foil to the new interest in Plato, stimulated new translations from the Greek and new interpreta tions. Theodore of Gaza and George of Trebizond made early . translations, and Achillinus and Pomonazzi were early students. The rediscovery of Aristotle created an embarrassing situation for the Church. Her chosen philosopher was found to teach im personal immortality, or no immortality at all, according as one was an Averroist or an Alexandrian, and to support by his nominalism the.importance of the individual, from the point of view of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, against the universal; Aldus made the first Greek translation available during the last decade of the XVth Century. Certain parts of Aristotle, at least In context through 126 commentaries, had been available for centuries. The dialec tic and ethics, and later the physics and metaphysics, in however garbled form, were standard university texts and an important part of medieval thought. However, this was not true Of the Poetics. Its ideas may have survived from Greek times in limited form in Polybius and the Ars Poetica,^ but the Poetics itself was practically unknown throughout the Middle Ages. It first appeared in a Latin translation of an abridgement made by Abu Baschar, a Nestorian Christian, about 1000, and later, in a translation by Hermannus, of a commen tary by Averroes based on an Arabic text. There were no translations during the Xlllth Century revival of Aristotle, and the other two translations had no effect on medieval criticism. It was unknown to Dante and Boccaccio, and, ex- cept for a single reference, is not alluded to by Petrarch. Aldus did not include it in the edition of 1495-8, though it is not clear why, since there were many Renaissance manuscripts available to him. Margolioth names, among his list of manuscript sources for his edition, thirteen manu- •Z scripts that are dated before 1500. One of these, Lauren- ^IngramBywater’s edition of the Greek text of the Poetics, Oxford, 1909, p. xxiv. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, New YorlF^ 1899, pp. 16- 17, denies any influence on Horace, Cicero, or Quintillian. 2Ibid., pp. 16-17. ^D. S. Margolioth, ed. of Poetics, London, 1911, pp. xv-xvi. 127 tius LX-14, was once in the possession of Poliziano and is referred to in one of his works. The first Latin edition was by Giorgo Valla, in 1498, and in 1508 it appeared in Greek in the Aldine edition of Rhetprices Graece.^ This last is from a corrupt text, although it was considered definitive for three hundred years.5 Spingarn does not note any definite influence of the Poetics until about 1535, and then it was first felt in drama, not criticism. In the middle of the XVIth Century, editors and commentators considered that the Poetics had been rediscovered after being a long time lost. So although it was not generally available, the Poetics could have been known to Hawes before 1500, either in Valla’s edition of 1498 or through the English humanists, who’ may have got hold of some of its ideas from manuscripts, when they were in Italy. I. RHETORIC AHD POETICS Probably the most obvious place at which Hawes may have used Aristotle is in his treatment of rhetoric. He is constantly conscious of the mechanics of his composition. He says repeatedly in each poem that he writes to teach, and he 4 Spingarn, Bywater, Margolioth, ££. cit., and S. H. Butcher, edition of the Poetics, London, 1929, p. xxv, all agree on these as the first two editions. 5Margolioth says that Lascaris used Ambrosianus B-78, written before 1497, and Laurentianus, lx-21, possibly bor rowed by him in 1492, in the Aldine edition. explains his allegory as a veil for the moral lesson. Then, in his treatment of the seven arts in The Pastime of Pleasure, he has a discourse on rhetoric seven hundred and fifty lines long, which, the critics unite in observing, is more space than is devoted to all the other arts put together. He di vides rhetoric into its five parts, invention, disposition, elocution, pronunciation, and memory, and explains them in detail. Pour of these, invention, disposition, elocution, and pronunciation, are discussed by Quintillian in The Institutes of Oratory, although only the first two are named.6 Hawes says he got his ideas from Virgil and Cicero by way of Lyd gate, and Mead points out that the five parts of rhetoric are listed in the table of contents of the Ad Herenium, just as Hawes has them.7 He probably got his classification from medi eval rhetoricians, and many sources, from Geoffrey of Vinsauf Q to Reisch, have been suggested. But here and there among these conventional categories, are occasional words that sug gest a more direct contact with true Aristotelian criticism, and these will presently be considered. 6II: 5-9. 7The De Ratione Dieendi, ad Herennium is probably not Cicero*s, although long 'attributed to him. Hawes would have thought it was his. 8William E. Mead, ed. of Pastime of Pleasure, for the E. E. T. S., London, 1927, pp. Ivi-lvii. He offers Faval’s discussion of medieval rhetoricians. 129 One of the manifestations of the Renaissance in Italy was an interest in expression# De Wulf says that the funda mental idea of one group of humanists was "the reduction of philosophy to dialectics, and of dialectics to rhetoric."9 Many of the Italian philosophers began as philologists, trans lating newlyfound Greek manuscripts into Latin. They admired QuintiIlian and Cicero, and ultimately their enthusiasm for form ended in the slavish imitation of Ciceronianlsm, ridi culed by Erasmus.^ It was the fashion, at the end of the XVth Century, to despise scholastic dialectic and to prefer rhetoric. This tendency was usually anti-Aristotelian, inso far as Aristotle was the guide of the medieval Church and its scholastic system, but in its admiration for Cicero it was guilty of even greater follies than scholasticism had been in its distinctions and dichotomies. However, at Its best, the interest in rhetoric showed a commendable attention to form, and Hawes* emphasis on it Is in itself a mark of the Renais sance. Scholasticism followed Aristotle’s dialectics but got its ideas on rhetoric from the Latin tradition. Neither the old nor the new fashion seemed to regard Aristotle’s Rhetoric with favor, and Hawes apparently did not know the work. One 9Maurice De Wulf, Medieval Philosophy, London, 1926, II: 266. ■^Cieeronianus• 130 looks in vain for any connection between dialectic and rheto ric, for the four kinds of rhetoric, for the three elements of persuasion, and for formal points like clearness and pro priety, the kinds of prose, and the divisions of a speech. If the Rhetoric had been known to Hawes, some of these points that are fundamental In Aristotle would surely appear. However, there are suggestions of the Poetics. There are no sustained passages showing such influence, but there are snatches that seem to be unmistakable. The first of the five parts of rhetoric is invention, whereby common wit chooses what material to take and what to reject.This is an imperfect statement of Aristotle’s 1P principle of selection. It is necessary for the artist to accept only those events which are part of the proper whole as Aristotle defines it, and to reject everything else. Hawes goes on to say that the whole must be brought to an active, not a slothful, conclusion, and that the whole must 1 % be intelligible. Perhaps this is simply verbiage, but It may mean that the denouement should grow organically out of the complication and be a reasonable conclusion from it. ^ The Pastime of Pleasure, 11. 701-8. The five sub divisions of invention are the five inward wits: common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. ■^Poetics, ch. viii. I5P. of P., 11. 722-735 131 Two of his subdivisions of invention are ttestimacyonn 14 and memory* He stresses the importance of determining the right length for the whole, and seems to prefer brevity* One must be able to remember the composition as a whole, to see it entire and complete and with a single effort of the memory, even before it is written. Aristotle had much to say.about the organic nature of the whole or complete poem*^ The ac tion must be complete and entire in itself, and its parts must fit together in an organic and living whole that is more than the sum. It must not be too short, because then there would not be time to make the parts clear or to produce a sustained effect in the whole. It must not be too long be cause then it would have to be observed piecemeal and cannot be experienced or remembered as a whole. Here Hawes and Aris totle both stress the same things: the necessity of determin ing upon the proper length of the poem to treat the material adequately, and the importance of constructing the whole so that it can be comprehended in a single effort of the memory. It is perhaps noteworthy that Hawes departs most from the traditional conception of the five Inward wits, where, as we shall see, he includes the most 'of what appears to be material from the Poetics. Aristotle defines a plot that is entire as one that has 14P. of P., 11. 736-764 •^Poetics, oh. vii a beginning, a middle, and an end* The second of Hawes* divi sions of rhetoric, "disposition,” considers the value of a "beginning" and an "end," strangely omitting the "middle," and Insists on the value of orderin, disposing the matter*^ Hawes’ discussion of the proper length of the poem, and its disposition, touches the two points in Aristotle’ description of beauty. Beauty, he says, "consists in magnitude and order.It is true, as Saintsbury tells us,^8 that "order" is the catchword of Geoffrey de Vinaauf’s Nova Poetica. But, at least, Hawes uses it in the same connection as Aristotle does. He would have had to be familiar with less than two of the twenty-six chapters of the Poetics to get all of the ap parent allusions so far discussed. Probably the chief esthetic problem of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance was the justification of poetry on moral grounds. Of course it was not an esthetic question really, because the esthetic attitude was precisely what was to be avoided, and one tried to deal with the problem always on other grounds. Allegory was the usual medieval justifies- 16P. of P., 11, 820-913. Regarding order he says (862-3) For dysposycyon ordereth every matter And gyveth the place after the degree. •^Poetics, ch. vil. ^8History of Criticism, New York, 1900, I: 413. 133 19 tion, and Spingarn traces its entrance into medieval thought through the Stoics and Sophists in their rationaliza tion of Greek mythology, and through the Platonic Jew, Philo of Alexandria, in the reconciliation of the Old Testament with other systems. There is enough allegory in certain of the prophetic and apocalyptic writings of the Bible, too, to give the idea to diligent Biblical students. The fourfold truth of Scripture and the elaborate moral and metaphysical systems that these habits of thinking imposed on all medieval 20 literature have already been discussed. The idea of allegory is one of the chief principles of Hawes* theory of poetry. He speaks repeatedly of cloaking the truth in allegory, and blowing out a fume to hide his 21 mind under a fable, "touching the truth with covert like ness, and ...craftely [colouring ] with cloudy fygurea The true sentence of all theyr scriptures. 5 His purpose is plainly to hide hi3 meaning, to obscure it from inquisitive and impious eyes, and to give those really worthy to understand It the pleasure of solving a puzzle to get the meaning. The idea of protecting the truth from the 20Supra, p. 79. 21P. of P., 11 24-50. 22P. Of P., 11 764 ff. 25Example of Virtue, st. 129; "Conversion of Swearers,” st. 2. 134 ignorant and from scoffers was the justification of Origen and Thomas, for example, among churchmen. The Renaissance idea of the purpose of allegory was not quite the same. Boc caccio^4 makes the purpose of poetry to praise virtue and dispraise vice, and the allegory is to add a veil of beauty to the moral meaning. Mantuan, a real Renaissance figure, defines poetry as truth hidden under the literal expression O C of a fable. Both of these discussions recognize.other elements besides the clothing of the moral meaning as the purpose of allegory: beauty in one case, and the fable in the other. For Hawes, the expression, or rather the concealment, of the moral truth is the whole purpose of allegory, Hawes says again and again in both poems that his pur pose is to teach both moral and intellectual truth. "All that is written,” he says, quoting Paul, "is to our docu ment,’ *^6 and he endeavors to fulfill that admonition in his own efforts. The ancient writers deserve our special grati tude, he says at the beginning of "The Conversion of Swear ers," for the record of history they keep for us, and he takes Lydgate as his guide in moral instruction.27 He censures 24John M. Berdan, Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1557, New York, 1920, p. 76; Spingarn, opv cit., "p. 9. 25Ibid., p. 10. 26E. of V., st. 3. 27P. of P., 11. 5796 to end. 135 those who disapprove of poetry as 1 1 lyes” and idle descrip tions; they fail to recognize the moral significance under Q Q the literal meaning of poetry. Poets instruct in virtue and shine in a darkness of sin with the light of their wls- oq dom. They are the repositories of knowledge, and the chief of these, again, is Lydgate.^9 Now this sounds very much like a defense of poetry. It certainly shows some of the fear that Plato had when he spoke of actual, not ideal, poetry, and found that it teaches wrong moral attitudes, fosters undisciplined emotions, and bodies forth imitations thrice removed from the truth. One of the Renaissance answers to the medieval Puritan-Platonic indictment of poetry was its force for righteous action and its ennobling influence. But Hawes does not stress the cul tural and civilizing effect of poetry or its effect on con duct, as the humanists did. His justification is less active an d extrovert. Nor is his defense of poetry couched in Aristotelian terms. Aristotle answers Plato point by point. To the epistomologioal objections Aristotle says poetry has univer sal and ideal truth, greater than history; to the ethical ob jections he answers that poetry is an ideal representation of 28P. of P., 11. 792-819. 29P. of P., 11. 1107-1160 50P. of P., 11. 1120-1176. life as it ought to be; to the psychological objections he has cartharsis to offer. With these Hawes has nothing to do. This is not surprising when we see even Sidney, who is gener ally supposed to have answered the Puritan-Platonic objec tions to poetry with help of Aristotle and to have intro duced him to England, using Plato himself, much more than Aristotle, to make his defense of poesy. Hawes answers the medieval objections to poetry in medieval terms: poetry pro vides moral instruction and a chance to learn things, and so it is justified. Ideally, Hawes says, the poet loves wisdom and truth and virtue, and dedicates his powers to setting them forth in his poetry, under the guise of allegory. But like Plato, and his successors in apologetics, Gosson and Sidney, he finds that actual and contemporary poets fall short of the glory. He is very humble about his own ability, but he at least is aiming in the right direction. But many of his fel lows, though learned, are squandering their talent on unprof itable love ballads. Hawes' definite emphasis on rhetoric is a characteris tic attitude of the Renaissance, and so is his desire to make an apology for poetry. But in each case he develops his ideas in old-fashioned terms. However, there are two or three definite points in the discussion of rhetoric that seem to show an acquaintance with the Poetics: material for a com- 137 position, he says, should he selected with a purpose and or- / dered into an organic whole that is well proportioned and of adequate length. Since the Poetics was lost to the Middle Ages and rediscovered by the XVth Century humanists of Italy, it seems probable that he got his Aristotelian ideas from the Poetics itself, or from some one who had recently read it, and that here we have really an influence of the Aristotle of the Renaissance. II. PSYCHOLOGY Hawes made several trials at a psychology, achieving no consistency, but grasping several traditional conceptions as they presented themselves to him. For instance, he gets hold of the Pythagorean idea of the value of music. In The Pastime of Pleasure^! Music tells Grand Amour that she can create harmony out of discord and unity out of diversity of knowledge, that she is the type of perfect reason,, and leads to celestial joy. She brings harmony to deranged physical conditions and health to the soul. She sharpens the mind and wits, gladdens the heart, and brings recreation after study. So, music is given significance for metaphysics and episto- mology, physiology and theology, psychology and sociology. Of course, Pythagoras* ideas were known from the patristic ' writers down, especially his theory of numbers and the idea 31P. of P., 11. 1505-84 X38 of harmony. So one does not conclude that Hawes knew Pytha goras: he simply expressed ideas commonly and popularly held. Another idea he holds is the whumorst t theory of per sonality. He says Youth is always of the course ryght lyght Hale and moyst and full of lustynes Moost of the ayre it is ruled by ryght And her complexyon hath chefe intrea Upon sanguyn.^2 Gold, he says, has no power over sanguine youth, for covet ousness is engendered only upon melancholy, which is cold and dry.33 T&ig ia proof that Pucel will not be influenced by Amour’s poverty. Mead points out that Empedocles, Aristotle, Galen, Bartholomeus, and medieval poets had a hand in setting the fashion for the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water.®4 But here again one does not therefore conclude that Hawes got the idea from Empedocles or Aristotle. His concep tion is covered with the literary and pseudo-scientific ac cretions of later days. Hawes is quite as serious over these fancies as he is over the formalized but sensible attempts to make a rational classification of psychological data. One of these is the 33p. of p., 11. 1863-67. Also 11. 2899-2901, Some hot and moyst and some colde and dry Some hot and drye moyst and cold Thus every one hath vertues sundry. 33pi_of_P., 11. 1870-4. 54P. of P., 11. 234-5. 139 • S t C idea of the five outward and five inward wits* The five outward wits are the familiar five senses $ Hawes tells us plainly that they are the eye, the ear, the nose, the mouth, and the hands. They require only to he named, and are not discussed, except that they are the gate3 by which knowledge comes to the inward wits. The inward wits.sure less simple* As he names them, they are common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Common wit discerns and Judges for each sense. It distinguishes pleasant from foul, truth from falsehood, good from bad, and makes Judgments of degree in the perceptions of the senses. He reviews the five outward senses, showing how common wit passes Judgment on perceptual data and makes them intelligible. In his discussion of rhetoric he mentions all the inward wits as handmaids to invention* Here again, common wit's primary function is discrimination: How comyn wytte.dooth full well electe What it should take and what it shall adjecte.37 ^p7~ofJ>., 11. 2780-2864. 36P. of P., 11. 2805-7, for example, regarding the co operation of the eyes and common wit: Nothynge is sene but it doth iuge it ,It dooth decerne the god frome badnes The hye the low/the foule the fayrnes. 11. 2840: The comyn wytte the fyrst of wyttes all Is to decerne all thynges in generall. 57P. of P., 11. 706-7. 140 "Imagynacyon" and fantasy are the second and third of the five wits. Prom Hawes' discussion it is difficult to dis tinguish between them They both seem to make it possible to see products of common wit whold and completely. Imagination ......... werketh by all due inelynacyon For to brynge the mater to the hole affecte, And fantasy than hath the whole aspecte The ymagyned mater to brynge to fynysheraent With good deayre and inwarde Jugement.38 He is saying that imagination and fantasy both have the power to see the whole composition as it is to be when it is fin ished, and to shape the matter to that end. He does not dis tinguish the unique function of imagination, but he says that fantasy takes the products of imagination and recasts them in to a new whole. His treatment of these "faculties'* under rhetoric does not clarify them. He speaks of imagination in venting fables to carry a truth, and fantasy finding "newe thynges" by abjuring sloth,but this is a familiar note upon which he returns to harp whenever he is not certain of the tune. He hurries over the last two of the wits. As an ad junct of invention, "estymacyon" is useful to determine the length of the "mater," the size of the literary vehicle neces sary to carry the idea.40 In theory, Hawes recommends "brev- 38P. of P., 11. 2844-48. 59P. of P., 11. 713-4 and 728. 40P. of P., 1. 842. 141 yaoon.**4^ In his discussion of estimation as one of the out ward wits, he develops this idea further: estimation deter mines not only the ttspaee,n whether long or short, that the , r cause ” should occupy, hut when and where it should he de livered, and what the weight or value of the argument is: And estymaeyon doth well comprehende The space/the place/and all the purveyance At what tyme. the power myghte entende To brynge the cause to perfect utteraunce After it weyeth the cause in balaunce By estymaeyon ony thynge is nombred By length or shortness how it is accombred. After common wit has discerned the sense data, imagin ation and fancy have correlated the separate apperceptions into a whole, and estimation has made a judgment regarding length, memory is useful to retain the product, Hall hole ex- prest by dame phyl©sophy.”43 The thought process in not fin ished, either, when the mind has come to a conclusion or even when it remembers that conclusion, but it must find expres sion : • • . • • the mynde whan the fourth have wrought Retayned all tyll the mynde have made An outwarde knowledge to the mater thought.44 Because of the confusion, especially in his discussion of imagination and fantasy, one suspects a certain obscurity in the author’s mind, and it Is possible that the conceptions 41P. of P., 1. 738. 45P. of P., 1. 763. 42P. of P., 11. 2850-56. 44P. of P., 11. 2857-59. 142 from which he drew had lost their vitality and that the scho lastic distinctions no longer carried much meaning to con temporary minds. The next problem is to determine his rela tion to his sources. Whether willfully or from ignorance Hawes sets one on quite the wrong trail in regard to sources for the five wits4® Plato, he says, has explained it all, but it is a dark mat ter, and one must know philosophy to understand it. This is the wrong scent. The five wits are Aristotelian, not Pla tonic . In the De Anima, Aristotle names the five outward senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and explains how they function in their respective mediums.4® This scheme o does Mead In his edition of the P. of P., for that matter (p. 237). He refers one to the notes In Lydgate’s Assembly of Gods (A. L. Triggs, editing for E. E. T. S., Lon- d'oh, 1896, 06: £l) for a discussion of the sources. Mr. Triggs tells in detail what other poets have mentioned the five wits. World and Child, Dods I: 273; Lydgate, Temple of Glass, 11. 560-1; Piers Plowman, Pas. I, 11. 15-15; 'WycTif* s Tracts, III: 117; Tale of Me 1 eb'eus; f,An Arysoun for sauynge of the fyve wyttes;" Interlude of the Four Elements; and Lydgate’s Assembly of Gods, T ~ * 1652, all mentioned the five wits, outward or inward. He continues the list practically down to the present. One could add also, for example, Gower, Confessio Amantis, I: 296: "As touchende of my wittes fyue;" and Everyman, irTwhich there is a character by the name of Five Wits. But with the exception, possibly, of Wyclif, these are allusions, not sources for Hawes’ ideas about the wits themselves. 46Pe Anima, II: 7-11. 145 was too simple to be much distorted by scholasticism: it ap pears intact in Pecock and survives almost into our own day. Pecock, like Hawes, names them even in the same order that Aristotle does, and observes simply that their purpose is 4 .1 7 sensation. The conception was widespread and natural, and Hawes merely follows a popular tradition. The inward wits are not so obvious. There was no com plete precedent in Aristotle to follow. Common wit, the first of the five, is the function comparable to the kind of perceptions that Aristotle calls common sensibles.^® Common sensibles are objects that are perceived indirectly through the senses and can be perceived through more than one sense. Experiences like movement, rest, figure, magnitude, number, unity, are known by the common sense. In a way it unites all the senses, by providing a common body of apperceptions. Pe cock follows Aristotle closely in some respects, although he really fails to make clear why it is called common wit. The purpose of common wit, he says, is to discern motion, rest, size, number, and figure.^9 Hawes misses this point almost ^Donet, pt. 1. 48pe Anima, III: 1, 2. ^ ponet, pt. 1, and Pol ewer-, ch. 6, for the five wits. London, l^Ol, E. E. t. S. Archbishop Johan Thoresby, in Lay • polk,s Catechism, pp. 18-19, note, names the five outward wits in the traditional way, but the inward wits are will, reason, memory, imagination, thought, Wyclif's inward wits in Trialogus, p. 94, and Latin Sermons, I: 203, II,vi: 36/22, are-familiar: sensus communis, virtus imaginative, virtus es timative, virtus fantastiea, et virtus memorativa. Quoted by Mead, _o|>. cit•, II vi- %» vii. 144 altogether. He has the feeling that common wit makes some sort of first judgment on sensuous perception: it discerns all things and discriminates good from had, fair from foul, but it does not perceive the common sensible3. He is not following Aristotle, or even the emasculated Aristotelian tradition of the XVth Century but has invented an ethical common wit of his own. Aristotle defines imagination as the power of calling up absent perceptions and emotions, and he identifies fantasy and imagination.®’ 0 Pecock says that imagination is remember ing and comparing the images of common wit, and he adds a function for "fantasye," that it sets together images not usually occurring that way. Hawes realizes that imagination does something with the material of common wit, and that fan tasy deals with the "ymagyned mater." But he does not see the relationship clearly and suggests that their purpose is to give a comprehensive view of the "whole affecte" and to shape the separate ideas to this end. Pecock1s idea of estimation, which has no parallel in Db Anima, is that it is an instinctive judgment of anti pathy or accordance, like the lamb’s fear of the lion. In the Follower he says that it perceives friendship and ideas not discernible by outward wits. Hawes conceives courageous 50Pe Anima, III; 3. 145 new ideas at this point, and comes nearer to a clear expres sion of his mind than he does at any other point in the dis course upon the wits. Mensuration he finds to be the func tion of estimation. Through it not only the length of the whole is determined, but, by a characteristic shift in point of view, the cause itself is weighed or Judged. His last wit, memory, is plain and simple, and appears in Pecock as tfmind,f l the place where the wits are stored or remembered. Memory is one of the four attributes of the mor tal soul for Aristotle.5- * - In general, Hawea is far from Aristotle in his inter pretation of the wits; and although in terms he follows the same tradition that Pecock and Thomas do he does not in in terpretation. Thomas52 says he is following Avicenna's com mentary on De Anima IV: 1, and names five interior senses. Common sense stands by itself, phantasy and imagination pre serve the common sense apperceptions, estimation apprehends intuitions not received through the senses, and the memora- tive sense retains the product of imagination. However, since De Anima IV: 1 does not exist, Thomas is building his psychological system on an inaccuracy, and Avicenna is re- 51Por example, De Anima III: 5. The other three are sensation, iraagination, and wi11. 5^Summa Theologica, I: 78, iv. 146 sponalble for a train of historical error. After he has done the best he can with the inward and outward wits, Hawes turns to still more obscure matters. “Na- ture naturynge naturate" made the stars, he says darkly, and the stars in their turn influence human life. The sun and moon have some virtue that makes the vegetative, sensitive, and intellective souls grow, but the heavenly bodies are de pendent for their power on the will of God. At this point he begins to feel again that he is beyond his depth. He wisely decides to write no more about this in English but refers the curious reader to the Latin to complete his knowledge.54 The phrase “nature naturynge naturate” is confused inaccuracy for two ideas: “natura naturate,” nature as ef fect, and ”natura naturans,” nature as source. The two con ceptions of nature existed in the Middle Ages, in Thomas, for example, and came from Aristotle. Nature was the principle of autonymous motion in a thing, or it was the thing possess ing such principle of motion or change,56 the form, and the product of the form in its action on matter. - Bruno, later in the XVIth Century, put it in theological terms, God, natura naturans, being the cause, and the world, natura naturate, 6^P« of P., 11. 2878-2905, for natura naturate and the kinds of souls. 54P. of P., 11. 2906-12. 55Lib. I, Physics I. 56Definitions of “natura" from the glossary of Richard McKeonrs Selections from Medieval Philosophy, New York, 1930, II: 472-3T -------------------- 147 the result, but it is essentially the Aristotelian distinc tion between form and matter. Hawes, in his inclusive phrase "nature naturynge naturate” does not seem to have understood this. He does not distinguish between nature creating and nature created, and he does not see that the phrase as he cn uses it means the universe. He says again that "nature naturinge" brings Amour to his "fortitude," and then to "re trograde," confusing the whole matter with astrology. The phrase may be considered to make sense in this context, but it lacks significance. Toward the end of the poem, when he is discussing the Virgin Birth, he writes a whole stanza about the problem.®8 He says, Thus without nature/nature wonderly In a vyrgyn pure openly hath wrought To the god of nature nathynge truely Impossyble is/for he made of nought Nature fyrst/whiche naturynge hath tought Naturately/ryght naturate to make Why may not he than the pure nature take. Apparently the first "nature” in the first line means nature naturate, and the other "nature" natura naturans. In the fifth and sixth lines "nature naturynge" produces "natura naturate," which is as it should be. Here Hawes seems to have a degree of understanding of the scholastic expression of this partly Aristotelian Idea. Hawes casually summarizes a philosophy in a line, in 57P. of P., 11. 5341-7. 58P. of P., 11. 5712-18. 148 a way that suggest that he is quite unaware of the real mean ing of his words. To emphasize the power of the sun and moon he mentions the three sorts of souls: Both vegetatyfe and cesnatyve also And also intellectyve without lesynge. 9 . ^ The sun and moon, he says, cause the growth of vegetative, sensitive, and intellective souls. Again, in an account of the creation, he says that on the sixth day God made beast, and man with sensitive and intellective souls. In the Aristotelian system, the kinds of souls had a serious and carefully considered place as a part of the psy chological theory. Aristotle names five or six soulsr nutri tive, reproductive, appetitive, sensitive, motor, thinking.^ But these are reducible to three: nutritive, sensitive, and intelligent.®^ These three faculties of the soul represent the hierarchy of the living world. Plants have nutritive souls, animals sensitive, and men intelligent, so man has preeminence. Thomas continues the tradition. He names the three faculties In the Summa Contra Gentiles, and expands them to five, vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, f t A and intellectual, in the Summa Theologica. He adds, to ac- 59P. of P., 11. 2893-4. 60P. of P., 11. 2696-730. 61De Anima, II: 2-4. ®^Historia Anlmalia, IX: 1, for example. ®3IIr 58. 64I: 78, i. 149 cent the integrity of intellectual substance, that they are not separate souls but part of an indivisible whole. Pecock correlates the three souls with the three regions of the body and calls them the nourishing, the vital, and the witty. Xt is notable that this passage in the Folewer comes almost directly upon a discussion of the five outward and inward wits. The two ideas, the five wits and the three souls, come together in Hawes as well. If Hawes did not get his ideas from Pecook, at least it Is evident that the two ideas were traditionally associated. Here again, in the matter of the souls, Hawes does not show by his context that these famous terms are more than names to him. It is safe to say that if he had had any understanding contact with Aristotle, even so near as Thomas1 own commentaries, he would have had something more vital to say about his psychological categories. III. ETHICS Ethics between Plato and Hawes was much altered, but it is surprising how little rearrangement of the virtues there was. The same ones are reiterated throughout the cen turies. Two points are notable. A realization of the moral value of truth, as honesty, sincerity, and a realistic out look upon the world, is generally lacking. This seems to be owning to the fact that although wisdom is important in clas- ^Folewer to the Donet, 9. 150 sical ethics, it was an intellectual quality for the an cients, and degenerated into prudence, a virtue of exped iency, during the Middle Ages5 but truth, as a basis of every permanently successful emotional, intellectual, and social experience, seems to be a modern idea. The other point is that these virtues, as they appear in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, are personal virtues, completely subjective, or dealing with the relations of one individual immediately with another or with God. They none of them try to solve problems of large groups of people or to establish collective social attitudes. And this is not remarkable, since the classical and Christian plans for socialized living even today do not occupy a very vital place in our thinking. Hawes says that there are four influences on man's life, or aspects of it that determine what his life shall be like.®6 CTHardynesn is warlike and chivalrous and leads to fame and victory; it is a synonym for courage. Sapience, by the wisdom of the seven arts and, especially, by theology, provides the way to salvation. Fortune represents contin gency or chance in life. Nature determined Man's physical ^propryte* 1 and the continuance of life itself. These four are the basis for a psychology, too, as well as an ethics. They represent emotion, intelligence, and desire as deter- 66E. of V., st. 23-150. 151 mining forces in human action, with the added factor of chance, in which the cause is not apparent. The first three are subjective causes and the last is an external cause. Hawes thought very well of this classification, and includes it on the title page of The Example of Virtue. These three, emotion, desire, and intelligence, form the usual trinity in Plato's psychology, and, ultimately, in his sociology, and the basis of his ethics.6* 7 Their proper virtues are, respectively, courage, temperance, and wisdom, and the secret of the righteous individual life is to keep the just balance between the three, with wisdom in control. Hawes calls his virtues whardynes,t t sapience, and nature, and he likewise Insists on the preeminence of.sapience over "hardynes." But he sees no way to resist nature. Its de mands are inevitable and uncontrollable and simply to be obeyed. As in Plato's conception, justice, from Hawes* point of view, is outside of the other three, and its function is not to destroy or repress any of them but to maintain each in its specialized function. Plato has no place for fortune in his economy at this point. Aristotle does not single out these three as compre hensive virtues, but he gives them a special prominence in his ethics. The contemplative life is preferable to all 6>7Rep. 4. 152 others, and the chief good for man is rational activity;68 intellectual realization is one of the requisites of a moral act;69 the intellectual virtues have a section to themselves in the Ethics, in contrast to the moral virtues.70 Courage and temperance are the first two of the moral virtues and get special attention.7- * * Likewise in the post-Aristotelian ethics, in the Magna Moralia, the Eudemean Ethics, and On the Virtues and Vices, often attributed to Aristotle but not gen uine, reason, courage, and temperance have prominent places 72 in lists of virtues. Aristotle recognizes contingency, but he does not stress it because of his insistence on the impor tance of cause as the basis of true knowledge.73 There can be no science of the accidental, but the accidental does ex ist, since not all things are of necessity.73 In the Magna Moralia and the Eudemean Ethics luck or fortune is said to come, not from reason, but from nature or the divine.76 Hawes' nature, "hardynes,” sapience, and fortune all are dis cussed in Aristotle’s ethics, but while they are stressed 68Hichomachean Ethics, I: 5, X: 7. 69N. E., III: 1-3. 7QN. 2., VI: 3-11. 71N. E., Illrl 6-8;.III: 12. 7^fhese treatises are Included in Ross' edition of the Nichomachean Ethics. 73Meta., I, and VI. 74Ibid., VI. 75Ibld., XI: 2. 76Magna Moralia, II: 8; Eudemean Ethics, VIII: 1, 14, is. : 153 they are not singled out as the only virtues. In this re spect Hawes is closer to Plato who makes temperance, wisdom, and courage comprehensive and exclusive virtues. The differ ence occurred because Aristotle looked first at;the world and experience and found them complicated and diverse, and Plato approached the matter from the point of view of the mind. Hawes represents the low and ignominious stage of separation from reality that this unscientific and idealistic attitude descends to after much inbreeding of conventional ideas in ordinary minds. The seven virtues as they appear in Thomas’ ^ and else where, were the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, and the four cardinal virtues, prudence, Justice, temperance, and fortitude. Prudence, temperance, and forti tude are the three Platonic and Aristotelian virtues Just discussed and a place for Justice will be found a little la ter. Thomas leaves a place for chance, contingency, or luck, in the universe, along with free will and evil. This tra dition of the cardinal virtues continues through ecclesiasti cal literature, both scholastic and popular. They were part 77Por example, Sgmam Theologioa, II, 2: 31-46, faith, hope, and charity; 47-79, prudence and Justice; 80-100, Justice; 101t140, piety and fortitude; 141-170, temperance. ^QSumma Contra Gentiles, III: 72-74. 154 79 of the prescribed instruction in the Church, and are named 80 and described in Archbishop Thoresby’s catechism. They ap pear also in Pecock’s Donet8^ and Pecock relates them to his own arrangement of virtues in the four tables. He calls the four cardinal virtues prudence, or knowledge of God’s laws, temperance, ghostly strength or doughtiness, and justice or righteousness. By his time, the virtues were a formula and occur always in connection with the twelve articles of be lief, the seven sins, the means of grace, and other funda mentals that churchmen were supposed to understand and be lieve. Prom another point of view, Pecock comes to the same conclusion regarding the organization of the virtues. His three regions of the body have been mentioned: the nourish ing, the vital, and the witty, and their corresponding vir- Q p tues, natural, "kunnyngal,K and moral. * These relate rough ly to the three traditional virtues: the "kunnyngal” to sapience, the natural to temperance, the moral to courage. He names the same divisions of prudence as Archbishop Thor- esby: intellect, or self evident truth; opinion, uncertain but probable; speculative science, specific knowledge deduced ^Included in Peckham’s "Constitutions,” supra, p. 14. 80hay Polk’s Catechism, op. cit., p. 77. 81II: 2. 82Polewer, 9-10. 155 from intellect, knowledge of doing; and craft, or knowledge of making. Some of these resemble Aristotle*s intellectual virtues,85 and Thomas’ list follows Aristotle.8^ One must remember that the virtue of temperance does not appear at all in this classification of Hawes, it is represented only by the force of nature. Fortune, although it is discussed by Aristotle and Thomas, does not appear in connection with the other three except in Hawes. However, the ancestry of his nature, "hardynes,** and sapience is unmistakable. They are recognizable as three of the cardinal virtues, chosen by the Middle Ages from Aristotle’s virtues because he made them prominent, and because they had the added sanction of Plato. The fourth of Hawes* virtues was justice. In its medieval and XVth Century occurrence it is placed on the same level with the others and made parallel to them. In both Plato and Aristotle it is outside the.other virtues as an arbiter. Plato makes it the principle of specialization, the maintenance of equilibrium among the others, the preeminence of wisdom. Aristotle, as well, at one point, makes Mthe just*’ the heart of his own ethics. He calls it the proportional, neither too much nor too little, the mean between extremes that Is the residencie of virtue.85 But In the same book he 85U. E., VI: 3-11. 85W. E., V: 2-3. 8^Summa Theologica, I: 14. 156 also defines justice under the practical dichotomy of dis tributive and corrective justice. Distributive justice gives awards and punishments according to the principles of equal ity and impartiality; corrective justice rights inequalities. Hawes does not suggest this idea of justice. Pecock calls it simply righteousness, and commends his tables of virtues to the inquirer. Justice was one of the four daughters of G-od in medieval symbolism; she was on the side of righteousness, pitted against mercy and peace. She demanded that sinful man should be given what was his due according to his deeds. Hawes does not give justice a position parallel to the other three cardinal virtues. As we have seen, he fills its place with fortune, with what might be interpreted as hopeless cynicism if Hawes were inclined to such social and metaphysi cal criticism. However, cynicism does not seem to be Hawes1 intention, and he is not aware that he has replaced justice with chance. Like Plato he puts justice outside of his other virtues and makes it a neutral arbiter among them. She does not make a decision among the virtues after they have presented their advantages, but declares that they all have something to offer man if they are properly used. Plato too decided in this way: he did not recommend the destruction of any one of the three aspects of man's personality, but merely put each one in its proper place. There is general agreement from Plato onward that the 157 proper use of the three aspects demands the preeminence of wisdom. The condition of Justice for Plato was that the in telligence should control the desire and the emotions. For Aristotle, knowledge, as has been said, makes it possible for man to live the good life by teaching him to make right choices for happiness, and this happiness is intellectual ac tivity, since that is man's characteristic function* Wisdom is both the means and the end.®® In Thomasian scholasticism, wisdom took on theological meaning. It is not only the highest good for man as man but also, as in Aristotle, the means to his final beatitude, the contemplation of God. The vision of God is chiefly an in tellectual experience? the cognition of God is the ultimate purpose and final cause of every intelligent substance.8^ God has knowledge in some of its Aristotelian aspects, such as science, wisdom, and prudence; and man's mind resembles Q Q God's. God's acts are determined by his wisdom, which is his essential nature, and He is no more free than man to make arbitrary decisions. From the point of view of conduct as well, wisdom Is preeminent: the appetitive powers must be subjected to the intellective powers, Thomas says,8® In later and popular religious writing wisdom is usual- 8®N. B., I. 8^Summa Contra Gentiles, III: 25, 37. 88Summa Theologica, I: 14. 89Ibid., IV: 79. 158 ly called prudence. Pecock defines it as the knowledge of God unto salvation, his nature, benefits, npunishings,t t and laws. It has ceased to be the means to the good life, or to be the good life itself, and becomes the counsel of expedi ency, to be informed about the way to escape punishments in the life to come, and to attain whatever rewards are In the way for the devout. In Hawes* allegory, there are several figures repre senting the general idea of wisdom. ‘ 'Wysdome” and Sapience are two names for the virtue spoken of before as one of the traditional trinity.90 "Dyscrecyon” is her sister,9^ - and QO Prudence, an auxilliary virtue or anoilla sapientiae. It is not clear whether he thinks of prudence as a separate vir tue related to sapience or only as an attribute of sapience, but only from the point of view of the allegory is it im portant to determine that. Discretion is the guide and men tor of Youth, giving him practical advice about conduct in the form of aphorisms, and staying with him to show him the way from one adventure to another and aid him in the absence of Sapience. Sapience is given much the advantage over the other three forces, in space and in the validity of her self- 90e. of V., 26, 47-51, 102-130. 01b. of V., 8 ff., 26, 52—5j etc* 92e. of v., 51, 119. vindication. She claims that she can offer him virtue, that Hardynes needs her guidance to be of value, that she is the foundation of the seven arts, the lode-star of heavenly doc trine, the means to understanding the Trinity, and the way to heaven. All these things she can do for man. Not only does she help Youth with this encouraging doctrine, but she changes the course of his life by advising him to matrimony, leads him seathless through the perils of worldly business, worldly vanity, the world, the flesh, and the devil, and brings him at last safely to his earthly love. Discretion is of a lower order than Sapience; that has to do with expediency and opinion, and this with the permanent values of knowledge and character. After Youth is fully established in wisdom, Dis cretion drops out and is not seen again. This happens when Youth’s marriage to Clennes is settled. Wisdom guides him throughout his career, but especially during his later en deavors to attain his love. When he finally marries Clennes and has his name changed to Vewftu*, he seems to have no more need of Wisdom. Thereafter his own strength and his love for Clennes lead him to the consummation of the vision of God. In the end, then, the life of virtue, trained in wisdom and chas tity, leads to eternal bliss. ^ But while the virtues are still useful, wisdom is made most important. 160 Aristotle means a capacity when he speaks of the in tellectual virtue: skill in deliberation and Judgment, prac tical wisdom, intuitive reason, the capacity that decides upon the mean between extremes. For Thomas, the knowledge of God is the first necessity of beatitude; for the writer of the catechism and for Pecock, the virtue of wisdom or prud ence is practically reducible to theological knowledge, a definite body of information. Hawes tells us that that is the kind of sapience his is: it has a body of moral and theo logical facts to offer. Hawes1 arrangement of virtues, with justice outside the series and independent of it, is more nearly like Pla tonic, than scholastic,, thinking. Hawes and the medieval writers and Plato also made their virtues exclusive, complete, and closed, completely covering the universe of discourse. For Aristotle, these three are only the most prominent of a number of observable virtues. This does not mean that Hawes got his ideas from the Renaissance Plato, but simply that Platonic Christianity of pre-Thomasian days had set scholas tic thinking in certain patterns that Xlllth Century and sub sequent Aristotelianism could not break. From another point of view, also, Hawes seems to favor Plato. *the members of his trinity, like Plato*s, are forces or functions, not vir tues, and it is their use that determines their value. In Aristotle and the Middle Ages the discussion Is of virtues. 161 However, in general, Hawes is nearer to Pecock than to Thomas, and to Aristotle than to Plato, in this aspect of his ethics. It seems right to say that he did not know Aris totle except as Platonism influenced the direction of Christ ianity in the earlier Middle Ages. If there is a possibility of the direct influence of Plato it is in these two points: the position of justice, and the virtues as a basis for psy chological as well as ethical organization* Thomas says that love is the greatest of the theologi cal virtues. Like knowledge and right willing, it jLs neces sary for beatitude. Love and knowledge of God fuse on that high level and are identical. Love persists along with faith and hope and the four cardinal virtues, and the seven con tinue to be mentioned together. In The Example of Virtue, as in Thomasian theology, the hero ultimately comes to his perfection in the beatific contemplation of God through the combined power of wisdom, a right will, and love. In The Pastime of Pleasure this admission of the im portance of love is continued by the underlying pattern of the poem. Love, ordered and controlled by wisdom and cour age, provides the basis for the ethics and the structure of the story. In this poem, however, there is a notable shift in emphasis. All through The Pastime of Pleasure Hawes in- 94 sists on the importance of wisdom. The head must rule > . over 94p. of p., 11. 144-47: 2465-85. 162 tiie body and wisdom, over courage. Logic Is of value because it teaches men to avoid the ill and choose the right.95 Grand Amour spends much of his time and much of the reader’s In being perfected in the seven arts and other aspects of wisdom. But the purpose of all this, and the value of the intellectual training, is not to attain a vision of God, as in Thomas and The Example of Virtue, nor to learn to live the intellectual life, which was Aristotle’s highest good for man. It was to make Grand Amour fit to gain an ideal earth ly, and ultimately an ideal heavenly, beauty, and this love, not wisdom for Itself, is the Incentive and goal for his en deavors. In this, as we shall see, he approaches the Pla tonic view. Aristotle has no important place for love; the Middle Ages made it the chief of the theological virtues, following the trace of Paul in his discourse upon ”these three,M but Plato gives it a different sort of preeminence. The heart of Aristotle’s ethics is the idea of the mean. The mean between two extremes of conduct is virtue*95 It is the just or proportional between too much and too lit- 97 tie. Goodness of character comes from habits of choosing the mean. He gives many examples to show how the principle applies in specific cases. Much apparent courage, for in stance, is only habit or irresponsibility or passion or high 95P. of P., 622-3. 96U. E.,. II: 8, 9.97H. E., V: 2, 3 163 spirits or ignorance. True courage is the mean, intellectu- 98 ally maintained, between cowardice and rashness. In the same way, temperance is the mean between self-indulgence and 99 100 insensibility. He continues to consider several social virtues, and here also goodness resides always in the mean. The doctrine of the mean involves, first, the idea of the control of the natural desires by the reason. Then, it is the function of the will to keep a balance between excess and defect. Finally, the mean is determined by practical wis dom. Hawes mentions the mean, calling it "measure,” but he seems to have no conception of the dignity and seriousness with which Aristotle surrounds it. He approaches it through geometry. Geometry is important, he says, because it can measure astronomical distances. It measures all things.*-92 Then without warning Hawes makes a shift in the meaning of the word “measure," to the idea of the "mean," or something like it. In a series of anaphoric verses he says that measure insures plenty, wisdom, industry, courage, righteousness, tem perance, joy. Measure, he says, is a necessary accompaniment 98N. E., III: 6-8. 9%. E., III: 12. 100In Bk. IV. lOlEdward Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Phil osophy, translation by t>. R. Palmer, New York, 1931, pp. 190- 91, gives these three points regarding the mean. 10gP. of P., 11. 2570-90 164 to virtue, and he illustrates his point by showing the ef fects of its presence and of its absence, again in ana phora, It helps those In high estate to keep their posi tion;'?'^ leads to virtue and happiness, and causes "the hasty dome to swage and modify."3* 05 In another stanza similar In form he says "without mesure, wo worth Jugement... temperance ...punysshement..• purveyaunce...sustenance,sadness, and.,. gladnes."3- 06 Two more stanzas, one with repetition on the phrase "mesure/mesurynge/mesuratly,R and the other, "mesure/ mesurat ly,"3- 07 finish the catalogue. They attribute every possible virtue and power to measure, and make It the "lod- sterre of all grace." 1-08- Measure appears later, too, as the porteress of the gates of the House of Correction,3- 09 but I05P. of P., 11. 2591-2604. Where that is mesure/there is no lackynge Where that is mesure/hale is the body Where that is mesure/good is the lyvynge Where that is mesure/wysedome is truely Where that is mesure/werke is dyrectly Where that is mesure/nature werkynge Nature encreaseth by ryght good knowledgynge. Where lakketh mesure/there is no plente Where lakketh mesure/seke Is the courage Where lakketh mesure/there is iniquyte Where lakketh mesure/there is grete outrage Where lakketh mesure/is none aduauntage Where lakketh mesure/there is grete glotonye Where lakketh mesure/is moost unhappy 104p ^ of p., 11. 2605-2611. 105P. of P., 11. 2612-18. 106 p. of p., 11. 2019-2615. 107P. of P., 11. 2626-39. 108p# of p., 1. 2639. 109P. of P., 11. 4164-5. 165 she receives little attention, and is characterized merely as ! t i a fayre and goodly creature*" She is connected here, alle gorically, instead of scholastically, as before, with the machinery o£ the ethical system Hawes advocates. Prom his words on measure, one is to conclude that he -uses it to express the idea of restriction and due propor tion. He does not say that the proper measure to take is ex actly the mean between extremes. But such an idea seems to be in his mind, and it is identified with moderation and judgment in all things. It is the "ground of all excellence" and the basis of almost every moral, intellectual, and spir itual value. Several of the virtues to which he says measure is essential are tha same as those Aristotle uses to illus trate the mean: courage, temperance, liberality, for example. But on the other hand there are many that Aristotle does not consider. This shows merely, that by whatever devious route the idea of the mean had come to Hawes, the idea of these virtues had come as well, associated with the mean and depen dent on it. As in the other aspects of his ethics, Hawes* Idea of the mean did not come directly from Aristotle but had probably filtered through by way of Xlllth Century scho lasticism and XVth Century commentaries. Mention has been made several times of the separate virtues named by Hawes. Considering individual virtues seems to be his characteristic way of thinking about ethics. He 166 makes lists, classifies, subdivides, and organizes virtues and vices at every opportunity. This habit is conventionally con sidered to have been popular in the Middle Ages, and the per sonifications of any miracle play or the catalogues in Thomas and Pecock bear this out. There can usually be little discus sion about what Hawes meant by his. virtues, because for the most part he simply names them and does not discuss them. Current meaning aided by context must give the connotation. I‘ hey are chiefly personified and occur as companions of the character who should possess them. One naturally follows Hawes* own method in dealing with his virtues, and classifies and organizes them. There are thirty or more separate virtues in The Pastime of Pleasure, some of them occurring several times in different settings, and something like the same number appear in The Example of Virtue. Allowing for repetitions, there are altogether about forty virtues in the two poems. A great many of them come from characteristically medi eval classifications: the seven cardinal virtues, the four daughters of God, the means of salvation, the seven saving graces. These occur in part in Thomas, in medieval devotion al literature, and in catechisms. It is notable that there are many more of themin The Example of Virtue than in The Pas time of Pleasure, and this fact bears out what has been said about the greater traditional influence in the first poem. 167 Mercy, charity, prayer, faith, contrition, penitence, purity, grace, virginity, restitution, abstinence, righteousness, confession, remembrance, exercise, occur in The Example, and only peace, mercy, grace, memory, and charity in The Pastime, In The Example most of these virtues are among the wedding guests. In The Pastime they occur.in the train of Pucel, to ward the end of the poem, and Mercy and Charity bury Grand Amour. If it i3 correct that there is more humanistic in fluence in The Pastime of Pleasure than in The Example of Virtue, and the fact seems to be sufficiently obvious, one would expect more Aristotelian virtues in this poem than in The Example of Virtue. This Is certainly the case. Of the virtues in the Aristotelian tradition, occurring in the Nicho- machaean Ethics, the Magna Moralia, the Eudemean Ethics, and Thomas, The Example has four: sapience, alias prudence or dis cretion, courage, liberality, and perseverance. The Pastime has these, and also steadfastness, truth, justice, courtesy, temperance, joy, amity, consuetude, and measure. Wisdom, temperance, and courage are the familiar trinity already dis cussed at length. Steadfastness, consuetude, and persever ance are Aristotle»s stability, habit of making right choices, and fixedness of purpose, and are requisites to right action in his ethics. These virtues are stimuli to right action in Hawes. Steadfastness, In one of its occurrences, is jailor in the House of Correction, Perseverance is sent by Pucel to encourage Grand Amour in the good life, and Consuetude is one of the knights who accompany him in his first journey as a knight. In Aristotle’s ethics the mean is the principle upon which right choices are made, and the state resulting from these choices is justice. Courtesy, truthfulness, friendship, and liberality, for example, Aristotle uses to illustrate the mean, and happiness is given as the end of man’s activity. But Hawe3* treatment of truth, courtesy, "amity,n and liber ality does not suggest that he considered them the mean be tween less perfect extremes, and his joy and pleasure are not a perfect correspondent to Aristotle*s happiness. The latter two probably have more of the idea of a worldly and sensuous experience than either Aristotle’s intellectual ful fillment or the Christian joy of salvation. They occur along with amorous purveyance, continuance, famous report, stead fastness, and amity, as foils to the giant whose seven heads are enemies to love. However, the four, truth, joy, amity, and liberality, are not stressed in medieval Aristotelian sources, and occur in Aristotle with greater prominence than they do in his commentators. So it is perhaps significant that Hawes considers them at all* Of Hawes* virtues, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, courtesy, and mutability, or its relative virtue steadfastness, appear as six of the seven major virtues in 169 The Faerie Queene, with only holiness omitted. Spenser’s in tention was to illustrate "the twelve Aristotelian virtues,* * and although\the seven that he completes of the projected whole am not all Aristotelian, it is interesting that they were also considered important by Hawes. Spenser wrote about what he and his contemporaries considered to be Aristotle’s virtues, and perhaps Hawes also was consciously endeavoring to illustrate them. Hawes mentions several miscellaneous virtues whose ancestry is not apparently significant. Health,for in stance, is considered important by Thomas, but its value is obvious in any case. Mysericorde and concord are religious virtues; nurture and "operation*1 are practical; amorous pur veyance, pleasure, and famous report are worldly. Although many of Hawes’ virtues are found ultimately in Aristotle, it is usually possible to find a closer source. of Hawes' virtues wear the characteristic marks of Aris totelian ethics: the means as the way to right choice, and intellectual experience as the good life. But consideration of the virtues in the two poems does show a shift of inter est. In The Example he is following medieval patterns of re ligion. In The Pastime he is using the patterns of scholas tic learning, especially as it deals with Aristotle's ethics. 110p. of P<j lm 2591 170 His treatment of these virtues does not seem to show any evi dence of direct knowledge of Aristotle, and consideration of contemporary humanists shows that not many of them knew much about the new Aristotle. But his use of Aristotelian vir tues may reflect a revived interest in Aristotle which could not yet express itself in exact knowledge or accurate inter pretation. This conclusion holds for his whole treatment of Aris totelian ideas. He does not seem to know Aristotle by direct contact. Hawes* mention of him is a gossipy allusion in The Pastime of Pleasure to his shrewish wife.^^^ Most of the Aristotelian ideas come to Hawes through medieval scholas ticism and popularized Thomasian theology as it was displayed in XVth Century catechisms and in the works of men like Pe- cock. It is not possible to say that he got his material from Pecock or any other one source, but simply that it comes from sources like that, and that the ideas were for the most part current and familiar. Knowledge of the Nichomachean Ethics was a tradition in England since the translation of Grosseteste in the Xlllth Century. However, at certain points in the handling of the three virtues, temperance, courage, and wisdom; in his consideration of virtues like friendship, liberality, and steadfastness; and especially in 11:LP. of P., 11. 3570 ff. the snatches of his ars poetica, he seems to get his ideas from sources outside of the medieval tradition. For in these cases he is either using ideas not stressed in the Middle Ages, as in the hits from the Poetics, or is treating them in a way nearer to Aristotle’s conception than to Thomas’ or Pe- eock’s, as he does with the three virtues. One does not therefore conclude that Hawes knew Aristotle’s text directly. The resemblances are too fleeting to come from actual textual knowledge. But they may come from conversations, from lec tures, from ephemeral current writing, among the humanists who had had, possibly, a taste of Aristotle in Italy and had brought new aspects and new points of view home with them. If there are any Aristotelian ideas besides the traditional ones, any new suggestions or different stress, they come from this intangible and current source. Even when he is follow ing conventional and medieval Aristotelianism, his increasing interest in the second of the two chief poems may reflect a current interest in Aristotle among the humanists. CHAPTER II PLATONIC IDEAS IN HAWES Plato's philosophy, like Aristotle» s, was felt in the Renaissance from two directions. New manuscripts were being discovered and new interpretations developed in the light of Renaissance feeling. But, parallel to this renascent Pla tonism, the Christian Platonism of the Church fathers sur vived, sometimes supporting the other or conflicting with it, and sometimes independent of it. The influence of Platonism on Christianity began be fore Christianity was formulated into doctrine. Philo, in his attempt to combine the Platonic idea of the Logos or supreme rational principle with the Old Testament conception of the Word of God as , f the highest expression of the tran scendent God of Judaeism,1 *^ provided John with the Logos which he identifies with Christ in the opening verses of his gospel. A little later Alexandrine Platonism again provided the terms of Christian doctrine in the formative period of ^William Temple, Plato and Christianity, London, 19J6, p. 293. The discussion of the history of the influence of Platonism is chiefly from this book, pp. 85-101, and From A. E. Taylor, Platonism and it3 Influence, London, 1932, especi ally pp. 15-20. Also, Maurice de Wulx, History of Medieval Philosophy, London, 1926. II: ch.* 25, and Henry Alline, His- toire du Texte de Platon, Paris, 1915, passim, especially pp. 281-308. 173 Athanasius and the council of Nicea. The ideal City of Heaven of the Republic was the model of much otherworldliness. Paul says "our citizenship is in O Heaven," Again in Hebrews he mentions the earthly taber nacle, as an imitation of the spiritual tabernacle in heaven. Origen said that the earthly Canaan is the model of the Prom ised Land above, "the words of Scripture the type and symbol of the eternal." Augustine's expression of Christian Utop ianism in the City of God is the climax of this Platonic im pulse to idealistic dualism. It is possible to look upon medieval society with its three estates, composed of crafts men, members of the feudal system, and churchmen, as a copy of the ideal archetype of the State. Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius were the three couriers of Platonism to Western Christianity. The Consola- tion of Philosophy, which gave "the justification of God's mysterious ways with man," by Its popularity in the Middle Ages provided familiar expression for the ideas of the Tri nity and the nature of Christ. The writings of "Dionysius the Areopagite" were supposed to be the works of Paul*3 con vert and to have special authority. His Christianized Neo- Platonic mysticism carried great weight in the Middle Ages, was translated by Erigena, and was studied seriously as late ^Phillipians 3: 20 174 as the XVth Century by Laurentius Valla, Groeyn, and Colet. Much of the mysticism that survived the weight of Aristotel- ianism and scholasticism was Platonic. Origen applied Pla to^ myths to Christian eschatology and influenced Ambrose and Erigena therein. The idea of the realization of truth through a beatific vision not only became part of medieval mystiGism in the minds of Augustine, Bernard, and Bonaven- tura, but crowned the otherwise rational system of Thomas* way of salvation. Mext to Augustine, perhaps the most important Platonic influence was the Timaeus. The Timaeus was the most popular of the Platonic dialogues during the Middle Ages. This was true primarily because until the Xlllth Century, it was the only one available in Latin translation.® Then it seemed to agree admirably with Christian theology. If one is ingen ious, one may discover in it the doctrine of the Trinity and of the creation as the imposition of form, or God*s idea upon chaotic matter. Until the Xlllth Century, the concep tion of the physical world was much determined by the Tim aeus. The Middle Ages as late as Pico and Colet were con cerned with correlating this account of the creation with that in Genesis. ®In a ivth Century translation of the first two books with a commentary by Chalcidius. 175 The philosophical outcome of Platonism in the Middle Ages was the doctrine of realism, the notion that reality is found in ideas or universals, not in particulars* Anselm is a final expression of many aspects of Christian Platonism: he defines the nature of the Trinity, the relation of God to his attributes, the Augustinian “Credo ut intellegam,” and crea tion from the mind of God, and, especially, realism. Hot long after him Aristotle began again to be considered, first, as with Abelard, without approval. The philosophical result was that nominalism, the conception that individuals or par ticulars, not ideas, are ultimate reality, came to oppose realism. Before the end of the Xlllth Century Aristotle was accepted by the Church, but two subsequent centuries of Aris- totelianism did not eclipse Plato entirely: many Platonic ideas, as it has been shown, became an inseparable part of Christian doctrine and custom. By the beginning of the XVth Century Platonism was being felt from another direction. In Byzantium the interest in Plato had never really died, and its vitality had been stimulated by a controversy, lasting from the IXth Century renaissance of Platonic schol arship to the XVth Century, regarding the relative value of Plato and Aristotle. Eventually, echoes of this controversy reached western Europe. During the Xlllth Century, transla tions were made of the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Timaeus, and manuscripts of several dialogues were available in the 176 Greek.^ But the chief interest was in Aristotle. Transla tions were not generally made of Plato, and there were few Greek scholars in Europe. Petrarch had an amateur interest in Plato but could not read Greek. The first complete manu script of Plato came from Byzantium in 1458, and from that time on many were collected in Italy. Pletho and Bessarion continued the quarrel with the Aristotelians, and Leonardo Bruni and George of Trebizond made early translations of several dialogues.® Picino made the first complete transla tion in 1477.® and published it in 1482, with commentaries. He was, perhaps, the most important of the group of Platon- ists whom Cosimo de Medici gathered together in the Floren tine Academy dedicated to the study of Plato. At the beginning of the XVth Century Duke Humphrey of Gloucester brought Latin translations of the Phaedo and the Meno to England after his Italian journey. These had been ^Laws, Letters, Definitions, Epinonis, Crlto, Phaedo, Cratylus, Euthyphron, Parmenides, I and II~H1oibiad'e3, Repub lic. From Alilne, pp. oit., pp. 2135-89. Bruni: Gorgias, Crito, Apology, Phaedrus; George of Trebizond: Laws, Parmenides; CasYIglione: Axioohus. Ibid., p. 295. ®Ibid., p. 302. De Wulf, says 1453, but although FI- cino was precocious, twenty seems unreasonably young to have translated all of Plato. Johm E. Sandys, Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, Cambridge, 1905, concurs with Alline. Sandys says, pp. 90-1, that Ficino had translated ten dialogues by 1464, ten more by 1469, and by 1477 had completed them all. 177 translated during the Xlllth Century. In the middle of the century Gray brought the Timaeus and the Euthyphron to Bal- liol, and in the 80"s LinaGre read the Phaedo in Italy. The full text of Plato in Latin was in print in Italy by 1482, and probably before that In manuscript form. Lascaris and others brought Greek manuscripts and a knowledge of Greek to Prance in the late XVth Century, but although Greek was taught at Oxford in 1491 there were no finished Greek scho lars in England until the beginning of the XVIth Century.7 But Linacre, More, and Colet, at least, had learned something of Platofs ideas from their contact with Platonists in Italy before the end of the century. The chief source of their Platonism was the transla tion and commentaries of Picino. He was especially inter ested in the idea of love and beauty, as it is set forth in the Phaedrus and in the Symposium, and In the idea of the summum bonum, and all of his concepts are touched with neo platonism. Along with other revivals in the Renaissance, there was renewed interest in the patristic writers and es pecially in Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Origen. So in addition to medieval survivals of the dialogues and of Chris tian Platonism in theology, one may look for these two new kinds of Platonic ideas, coming from the rediscovered Church ^Erasmus grants six to London in 1506, 178 Fathers and from the text of Plato, especially as it was in terpreted by Ficino and Pico. Hawes’ only mention of Plato is in The Pastime of Pleasure, at the end of his duscussion of the five inward senses. He 3ays that Plato has explained the whole problem of the effect of nature upon matter, but he adds that this is all very obscure, and one must know philosophy to understand Q it. This reference may be a blundering attempt to state the main idea of the Timaeus, which was the best known of Plato’s dialogues before the XVIth Century. The thesis of the Tim aeus is that the world of ideas, imposed upon matter, pro duces the sensible world. Two other instances of Platonic influence have al ready been noted. One of these in Hawes' justification of poetry on purely moral grounds. The medieval condemnation of poetry is based in part on a limited interpretation of Pla to's exile of poets from the ideal republic. Only Plato’s moral charge against poetry was recognised, that poetry often exhibits immoral and impious examples to its readers. The vindication offered by the Middle Ages and by Hawes was that poetry should teach a lesson, and Hawes is very obvious in his insistence on his own didacticism. But this is a petri fied medieval influence, not a new renaissance idea. 8P. of P., 11. 2864-78 179 The other Platonic suggestion already discussed is found in three of the four virtues in The Example, with Jus tice outside them all as judge. Briefly again, nature, hardynes, and wisdom, correspond roughly to desire, courage, and intelligence in the Republic. Plato’s idea of justice, the principle of specialization, provides for the preeminence of wisdom. This is the ease in Hawes, and the value of each when controlled by wisdom is hinted at as well. However, aside from the fact that these virtues occur as well in Aris totle, Thomas, and later medieval writers, though not in this definite trilogy, there is an insecurity about Hawes’ think ing that does not convince one that he knew the virtues of Republic directly. Then there is fortune to be consid ered, whieh does not occur in Plato’s plan at all and which would disturb the whole scheme of ethics of the Republic. Justice and the three Platonic virtues may be only an echo from medieval Platonism, so overlaid and metamorphosed by the weight of scholasticism that its real nature is lost. How ever, it should be remembered that Picino names the four Platonic virtues as prudence, fortune, justice, and temper ance.® He omits courage but includes fortune. But on the whole it seems that if Hawes had known'his ultimate source Commentary on Gonvivium of Plato, regarding love, in the edition of his translation of Plato, 1491 edition, leaf 137, IV: 5. 180 and was consciously following it, lie would have tried to make his product correspond to it more closely. I. LOVE AMD BEAUTY The chief centers of Platonic ideas in Hawes are two: love and beauty, and the two worlds. As in the case of the other three Platonic suggestions already spoken of, they are a confusion of old and new, Platonic and Aristotelian, Pla tonic and Christian, and the task is to disentangle the threads to see if any of them come from the Renaissance. The two ideas are really one, or different aspects of one, and appear in almost complete form in both poems. However, the full-formed conception of love as it appears in Hawes* poetry as a whole is more important than the differences to be found in the two poems. In both poems the lover is the hero, and, as a liter ary device, Is identified with the author. When we first meet him he has undertaken a quest, but it is not yet certain what he is looking for. The quest appeared all through the Middle Ages not only as a literary form but as the journey of the soul toward God In the minds of the religious. This mystic tendency was a survival of the mysticism of the pat ristic writers, and Augustine, who were influenced by the Platonic quest of the searching soul. To begin with, then, there is the inquiring hero with out a definite purpose in his search. He has at first, ap 181 parently, only an insistent yearning, like the philosopher at the beginning of his life in the Phaedrus and Symposium, but for nothing more definite than the good life. Youth, in The Example, puts himself under the guidance of Dyscrecion,and by her is subjected to instruction. In this he shows unusual precocity, and must have been given a previous set in that direction-by medieval doctrine. Grand Asaour, in The Pastime does not go so blindly. Very early he makes his choice for the active life in preference to the contemplative, knowing when he does so that it will lead him to fame and La Bell Pucel.^ Presently, also, he makes I p another decision and goes the road to doctrine. He has set his heart to be "Intelligible,1 * and he goes with the con viction that to a willing heart nought is impossible. In both poems the object of the search takes form gradually in the hero's mind,*and changes somewhat in the course of his search. But it is rather the lover who changes with the mutability of the world, while the beloved remains constant. It is psychologically more accurate to begin with the nature of the love instead of with the nature of the beloved, although beauty, the beloved, has philosophical priority. It 10E. of V., st. 8-10. 13-P. of P., 11. 85-96. 12P. of P., 11. 134-40. 182 must be remembered that tbe lovers started with the desire only, and the nature of the object was not fully realized un til the end. Plato starts with the love, too. He considers the na ture of the love throughout the Phaedrus and the Symposium, and the speakers who are bound entirely by the limitations of the temporal world treat it simply as an emotional ex perience, apart from the object. Lysias’ speech, and Soc rates’ counter-speech, in the Phaedrus, and the speeches of Agathon and Eryximachus in the Symposium are all of this sort. When he finally comes to true definitions of love, they include the object of the love. In the Phaedrus Soc rates says that the yearning of the philosopher for the heav enly beauty, stimulated by earthly beauty, is erotic madness, the fourth of the varieties of divine, as contrasted with pathological, madness. When the soul has learned to subdue its irrational Impulses in its approach to beauty, It will grow wings to mount to heaven and be again in the presence of absolute truth. In the Symposium Beauty is less closely identified with Ideas. Diotima, quoted by Socrates, says ; that love is the desire for the good and the beautiful, and it is not the desire of possession only but of generation, of ’ ’birth in beauty,” the desire for immortality in beauty. There are two kinds of love, says Pausanius, using a myth about their birth in illustration, and Socrates sanctions the 183 dichotomy with the words of Diotima* They are the earthly or Pandemian, and the celestial or TJranian, the one physical and the other spiritual. Diotima uses another myth about the birth of Eros, born of Penia, want, and Poros, the rich and wise, on the birthday of Aphrodite. This birth explains why love has ever unfulfilled desire and unbounded energy in the pursuit of the beautiful, which is really true knowledge. We cannot expect to find in Hawes a careful represent tation of Platonic love as it appears in the dialogues. Hawes runs the scale of a half dozen traditions. There is much of the convention of Ovid and courtly love, and of the romance of chivalry. The Platonic aspect takes two forms in Renaissance poetry, Petrarchan' and Picinian, and perhaps both may be distinguished in Hawes. Then there is a touch of the Christian love for God and Christ. There is not much emotion of any sort in The Example of Virtue. Before Youth sees his lady he knows her by re port, but in his pursuit of her he is only acquiescing in the judgment of Sapience and Discretion, under whose guid ance he acts. If she be fair and bright, he says when he 1 ^ first hears of her, he will be glad to marry her. He con sents because of his confidence in the assurance of Sapience that the marriage will promote his virtue. A little later I5E. of V., st. 152. 184 lie is able to resist the temptation of sensuality beoause he wants to preserve his chastity for Clennes,14 and he safely crosses the frail bridge at the River of Worldly Vanity partly because of her encouragement.15 After he has met her and has received her favor, he is again saved in his battle against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, by the sight of Clennes, and he fights with redoubled effort and renewed strength under her inspiration. She serves chiefly as a stimulus to the virtuous life, and his love for her is really a love of virtue. It is not very clear why the father of Clennes, or chastity, is the god of love, but so he is. The love he rep resents with his surprising symbolism has not much to do with the experience of the principals in the poem, and Hhym for to se it was a wonder,” Hawes admits.16 He sits, because love 1 * 7 is useless if it have not stability. He is blind because it is impossible to cover love. He Is naked, to show that love desires only the body of the beloved. His wings show the swiftness of love. The dart and torch indicate the physical experience of unrequited love. One leg is armed to defend right love and amend wrong, and the other is naked for I Q chastity. This is love after the fashion of the court of 14E. of V., st. 160. 15E. of V., st. 181-83. l6E. of V., st. 187. 1t7K. of V., st. 206-7. ISE. of V., st. 185-92. 185 love with an Ovidian background, and he could as well be omitted as far as his part in the movement of the main idea is concerned. His daughter does not inherit his qualities, and she appears, presently, wise and good, wearing her three crowns of chastity. Youth's love made it possible at crucial points, for him to overcome the evil of the world in various forms. It also kept him constantly to his desire for the good life and strengthened him to its accomplishment. All of his acts were to the same purpose, and were motivated by the same idea, that he should become virtuous enough to merit Clennes. In his speech to her after he has proved himself he grants her divine and eternal qualities of virtue and comfort. His love for her is the inspiration of all his deeds, and it is directed not so much toward her earthly beauty as toward her heavenly virtue. This was Ficino's interpretation of Plato. He speaks especially of love as the way to virtue,^0 and of beauty as the cause of all things.^ This high mood of Hawes does not last. Next we find Youth making a complaint to Sapience, telling of his lover's pangs for Clennes and Insisting that he must marry her.^ He meets his love In a garden where the rite of the "margarete” l9E. of V., st. 223. 20I: 4. 21II: 4. 22E. of V., st. 233. 186 takes place. She gives him a "Margarete,” and he receives g r z and kisses it# Then she shows him the beauty of the gar- gvt den, which is a copy of the heavenly garden. All of this, the complaint, the margarete, and the garden — all except the idealism — is part of the mechanism of courtly love and comes from the tradition of Marie de France and William de Lorrie. There was still much of this sort of thing in the XVth Century, from The Flower and the Leaf and The Court of Love to the Kingis Quair. Next we hear the pronouncement of the Church regarding this love. A great many ecclesiastical virtues, elsewhere 25 enumerated, are present at the wedding, and there are also saints and angels from heaven, all giving their approval. Jerome addresses love as "joyner of vertue and well of vnyte,”2® and the Church sanctions the wedding with sacra- ment. The value of love from this point of view is to pro mote virtue and unity. These values may be said to have theological significance; virtue was a prerequisite to salva tion, and unity, whether mystical or epistemological, was an ever to be desired state. 2:5E. of V., st. 235-36. 24B. of V., st. 237-40. 25Supra, p. 167. 26E. of V., st. 249. 27E. of V. st. 259 and 264-6. 187 After the wedding, Vertu allows himself to rejoice, and he kisses Clennes to show his father-in-law that he still loves her.28 But what he really wants now is rest from O Q life, ^ and his desire leads him to heaven. He has the nos talgia for heaven that the Platonic and Plotinian, as well as the Christian, soul has for its true celestial home. The two yearn for the "beauty of God and the joy of His contemp lation, and the final fulfillment of their love is the eter- ■xn nal cognition of God. Now the beatific vision of God was the consummation devoutly to be wished in both mystical and Thomasian theo logy# and Hawes says that if one loves Christ and lives his life in virtue and chastity he will come to this eternal bliss.^ ^his is a religious love for Christ and a desire after beatitude. But the difference in The Example of Vir tue is that the beatific vision is the consummation of an earthly love which grows into a heavenly love of celestial - beauty. Youth loves Clennes sometimes as an ideal of beauty and virtue, but he loves her as well for her earthly beauty. He has to learn to love her only for her heavenly beauty, and to be able to see the pure beauty of God. The highest point in love in the Symposium is the love of absolute beauty, and 28E. of V., st. 258, 270. 29E. of V., st. 267 50E. of V., st. 288-291. 51E. of V., st. 292 188 beatitude is the satisfaction of eternal contemplation of it. It is Instructive to notice that Picino puts this philosophi cal and poetical conclusion into more theological terms. Love brings souls to heaven, he says, and grants eternal joy.32 It is the medium between God and man, and makes it possible to elevate the soul to the splendor of the divine 33 countenance. Here, Hawes is not far from Picino*s Platon ism. But, having said this, one must add as well that it Is never possible to be sure. However attractive may be the idea that Hawes is influenced by the Platonism of Picino, it must be considered only as a possibility. It must be said In honesty that the end of The Example of Virtue is filled with Dantean imagery. The hero, led by an angel and accom panied by his ideally beautiful beloved, tours the three levels of Hell, seeing souls in varying degrees of torment, burning in fire and freezing in ice.34 The seven sins are there, as in the Purgatorio, and the worst sinners are in the deepest pit of Hell. Prom there the hero goes to Para dise, omitting Purgatory, and there he recognizes saints from earth and finally, accompanied, however, by his beloved, ex periences the beatific vision.35 Of course, if Hawes had known something about the Divina Comedia, the fact would not 32IV: 6. 35I: 4; V: 3. 54-S. of V., st. 271-81. 55E. of V», sfe. 282-292. X89 preclude the possibility that he had contact with Picino*s ideas as well, but one must guard against Dantean for Pla tonic figures. The movement of ideas in The Pastime of Pleasure and in The Example of Virtue, is similar, but the emphasis is a little different at some points. At first Amour*s love for La Bell Pucel is an inspiration to the good life. He knows her only by report, but "...her swete reporte so [hisj herte set on fyre" that he desires to brave all dangers for the sight of her.36 Fame says that he can gain her for his own if he learns doc trine, so all of Amour*s subsequent toils and adventures are practical expression of his love. The idea of her continues all through the poem to have the effect of keeping him at his endeavors. For instance, when he leaves the Tower of Doctrine and gets his license to go tb Chivalry for instruc tion, he is strengthened in his purpose by his love for his lady.3* 7 For all my mynde with percynge influence Was sette upon the moost fayre lady Label1 pucele. Again, as he is fighting the three-headed giant, enemy to love, he is about to be overcome when the thought of Pucel 36P. of P. , 11. 288-294. 37P. of P., 11. 2913-20. 190 inspires him to new strength, the sun comes out, and he is 38 able to be victorious. When he recounts the course of his 3Q love to Venus, he says that Her swete reporte gave exortacyon Unto my herte for to be courygyous, and to pursue whatever was necessary ...to pass the passage harde and troblous. He has been aided in his weakest moments by her appearance in the flesh to encourage him at his tasks. This kind of love, that yearns for the beauty of Pucel and urges Amour to en- dSavor after perfection, is the most characteristic love of the poem, because it furnishes the motivation for all the ac tion from the point of view of structure and of ethics. As in The Example, love in The Pastime has the Ficin- ian quality of being the way to the good and the inspiration of the acts of the lover. The passage from which Ficino gets this idea is the speech of Phaedrus at the beginning of the Symposium, in which love is made the incentive to prowess and ambition, an impulse to exhibitionism before the beloved. Phaedrus does not express Plato’s own ideas, and the speeches in the Symposium that do, do not stress this idea. It is true that the hunger of the philosopher after beauty is the ruling impulse in the life of a true lover. But he is aspir ing to possess beauty, virtue, and wisdom rather than to per- 58P. of P., 11. 4400-4409. 39P> of P., 11. 3804-3950. 191 form good deeds. This is indeed the purpose of Grand Amour, the possession of his beloved, who is good, wise, and beauti ful. To do it he has to realize certain intellectual and moral values that are means to eternal beauty; these will be considered later. Grand Amour seems to be inspired by his love in this broader sense, buthe is also inspired specifi cally to brave deeds. Hawes follows both the Ficinian in terpretation and the true import of Plato on this point. Venus, in her letter to Pucel in behalf of Amour,4' 0 says that nature has made beauty so that men will love it and, because of it, will desire to populate the world. The desire for procreation, Diotima says, is the real object of love. Love is not simply the desire for physical pleasure and for possession of the beautiful beloved; it is the desire to become immortal through the generation of beauty. The Pandemian Eros tdces this physical form, and this is all Hawes* Venus knows about. Diotima continues, however, that this is only the least important kind of love. The celestial love desires to generate ideas and to have a spiritual birth in beauty. Of this kind of generation there seems to be no hint from Hawes. These ideas that seem to be Platonic, coming from Venus provide another example of the strange eclecticism of 40P. of P. 11. 3958-64. 192 Hawes, and the proximity of the old and the new systems. In the midst of his adventures Amour is wounded by the high beauty of Venus.4^ It would be convenient to call this ex perience a Platonic realization. However, Plato is careful to point out that love itself is neither beautiful nor foul, but only aspiration to a beauty that is not itself. Socrates criticizes Agathon for indiscriminately praising love and for giving it the quality it pursues.42 Usually, Venus is part of the machinery of courtly love. After Grand Amour told her how Pucel is the inspiration of all his endeavor, he ends by making a formal plaint of his love and giving a physical de- A * 2 scription of his lady. ^ Venus, taking pity on him, sends a letter to Pucel, the contents of which have been described, and dispatches it by Cupid. Amour makes an offering of a 44 dove to Venus and sets out again with her blessing. The courtly love tradition occurs elsewhere in the poem in fully developed form. When Amour sees Pucel in the Tower of Music, he is ravished by her earthly beauty; when she leaves him, he is so sad he cannot speak.45 He breaks into a complaint about his pain at not enjoying his love;^° and a confidant, in the person of Council, conveniently ap- P. of * * 11. 3067-73. AO 3 ympo s Xxxm • P. of p., 11. 3804-3950. 44P. of P., 11. 3964-4104. 'P. of p., 11. 1480-1505. 46P. of P., 11. 1584-1665. 193 47 pears to listen to his woe. He recounts the pains of love, composes a formal complaint, swears his friend to secrecy, and compares his lady to classical beauties, all in the best courtly love form. Council promises to heal him by reason and says that one must take the pain with the pleasure and suffer to deserve the love to come. He prophesies that she cannot remain hard forever, and will finally yield from pity 4.Q and reward his pains. This, too, can be relied upon to happen in a courtly love affair. The love at this point is purely physical, and Amour*s satisfaction is to be physical^® Nature will prevail, and he will enjoy his love. I.t falls out as Council said it would. Amour dis covers and enters a garden whose porteress is Courtesy.^® The garden has shrubs cut like lions and dragons, flowers made by Flora, and a gold and azure fountain shaped like a dragon, and lacks only the painted story and the birds sing- 51 ing in harmony to be complete. Pucel is sitting In an ar bor, dressed in a fine blue velvet robe, her golden hair about her shoulders, plaiting a chaplet of flowers.^2 Then begins a pretty contest of wits between them.^ He sighs and she is coy. She tells him he does not really love her, 47P. ofT., 11. 1670-1709. 48p. of P., 11. 1784-1855. ( P. of p., 11. 1912-1925. 50P. of P., 11. 1975-1981. •P. of p., 11. 2010-2030. 52P. of P., 11. 2031-2051. 'P. of p., 11. 2052-2408. 194 and he vows constancy. She accuses him of being fickle and says her friends would not accept him, since he is of low de gree. But when she sees his languishing looks she admits that she has loved him all the time and wanted only to see if he intended some evil. She finally gives her consent, but says that he must come to her through many dangers. He re joices and recounts his sufferings, and with mutual sorrow they part to meet again. All this is nothing but old-fashioned courtly love which had found several literary expressions in the XVth.- CZ/I Century. ^ It has been discussed at some length to show how completely Hawes transplants the system into his poem, and then surrounds it with incongruous, or at least foreign,,mat erial. In a courtly love situation, the obstacles in the way of the attainment of the love were not ordinarily the seven liberal arts and the conquering of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the lady was not usually the ideal goodness, truth, and beauty that she is in The Example and The Pastime. As a foil to the courtly love, Hawes gives us the satiric fabliau of the Godfrey Govylyve episodes. Godfrey 54por the rules of the court of love, see, for instance, William Dodd, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Gower, Boston, 1913, pp. 1-20. William Allen Neilson, Origins and Sources of the Court of Love, Boston, 1899. There are at least a dozen important English poems of the XVth Century containing courtly love material. 55P. of P., 11. 3487-3803 and 4105-4218. 195 presents the common man's dislike both of the unreal and ar tificial customs and ostensible beliefs of the nobility, as they are formalized in courtly love, and the ecclesiastic distrust of women and love. Women are unstable, he says, and representatives of the devil, causing the downfall of man. This is heresy for the courtly lover, just as the frank sen suality of courtly love was heresy to the Platonic love of Petrarch and Picino. After’ Amour has finally won aiid married Pueel, both his earthly and his heavenly love are forgotten. He lives for several years in satisfied joy, in an ideal earthly para dise and with a degree of earthly love, presumably, but his time is engaged by policy and riches, and he finally dies.^® This is a psychologically accurate observation on life, but it is an anticlimax in art and in philosophy. One leaves the poem with the feeling that Amour’s early love, which touches or just misses the Platonic attitude, is only a youthful fancy that could not carry over into mature life and must fade in the light of common day. It is hard to see a reason why he should finish the two poems so differently. The love of The Pastime of Pleas ure is more Platonic at its inception than that of The Ex ample of Virtue. It is true, as well, that the courtly love 56P. of P., 11. 5327-5340. 196 episode is also more complete. But as soon as Grand Amour touches his beloved his love becomes more commonplace and domestic and conjugal, and its ideal qualities fade away. In The Example of Virtue, the chaste love of Youth becomes pure ly celestial after the marriage and will not let him rest un til he has experienced the eternal beauty. But in the very presence of the divine vision the author says brusquely that he really knows little of such matters, and he falls back into the habitual protection of his ecclesiastical creed.57 Hawes is often most irritating. Within touch of a really Platonic expression or a real Platonic idea he usually seems unconscious of it, and turns and passes by on the other side without grasping it. We have now to consider the nature of the object of the love of Youth and Grand Amour. The concept of the be loved alters just as the nature of the love does. In each poem there is one idea that is dominant and seems really to express the nature of the beloved, but within this frame are certian other accidental or wholly adventious attributes. The lover of The Example of Virtue begins only with the purpose of finding the good life. There is no specific statement on this point,.s but the whole poem is the account of a pilgrim soul searching for the good life. 57E. of V., St. 290. 197 Not until he has had much instruction in discretion and the general virtues of practical life does he have any more definite goal. Thai Sapience suggests to him that he should marry "to eschew all yll sensualyte.n5S This is a low purpose, perhaps, hut it is consonant with the ideal of his beloved, and with the final consummation. "To eschew all yll sensualyte" became the highest virtue and the purpose of his life. The lady that Sapience has in mind for him is of no ble lineage, full of virtue, beauty, and purity,89 and Youth learns presently that her name is Dame Clennes, or Chasti ty.®® She is hard to win and demands special virtues of strength against the world. At his first glimpse of her, across a tidal river, spanned by the treacherous bridge, he finds her to be demure of countenance and without pride, and he rejoices.®*- She encourages him as he ventures upon the bridge and later arms himself for the contest with the world, the flesh, and the devil. She is the daughter of Love, who is a sort of allegorical monster described in Ovidian and courtly love terms, as we have seen. Clennes herself wears the three patristic crowns of her virginity, representing perfect virgins of religion, maids keeping chastity, and true 58E. of V., st. 151. ®°E. of V., st. 159. 59E. of V., st. 152-154. 61E. of V., st. 179. 198 widows. Prom this meeting with Clennes and her father he goes straight to his encounter with the dragon. Now, as when he was tempted by the lady of fleshly pleasure, the memory of his lady makes him strong to overcome evil, and he returns to be married to her.®3 Now for the first time, after his name has been changed to Vertu? , he begins to see the true nature of Clennes. He has before seen her as a lady of great purity and beauty through whose inspiration he has been able to overcome evil and whom he has an earthly desire to marry But now he sees her heavenly qualities. He calls her "sterne of the blysse eterne,..well of vertu and of great renoune,...devine com- CL A forte and sempyterne,, f recognizing her virtue as eternal and divine. At her marriage she is surrounded by many vir tues of the Ghurch, as we have seen, and fifter the Sacrament is over the two are translated at once to heaven. Chastity, of course, is not the Platonic beauty that Diotima calls the object and cause of love. It is a monas tic ideal, and in the ascetic tradition, the union of youth and chastity was considered the best state for man. On the other hand, in Plato the idea is essential to the good life and to the realization of divine beauty. The superiority of 62E. of V., st. 194. 63E. of V., st. 206 and 222. 64E. of V., st. 223. of the Uranian to the Pandemian Venus, and of the spiritual love or a spiritual beauty to the physical, are stressed throughout the Symposium, Moreover, this aspect of Plato's theory of love received especial attention at the hands of Picino, He insists that true beauty is incorporeal and must be experienced only through the ears, the eyes, and the . mind, and he praises the celestial to the exclusion of the vulgar,66 This position is in many ways in accord with Pla to’s. Plato emphasizes that the physical expression of love, the love of physical beauty, and the desire for physical pro creation, even ”birth in beauty,” are only transient steps in the discipline of the soul to the true love of true beauty. Youth’s love of Clennes ultimately leads to the vision of God, a consummation that Picino tells us is the real purpose pri of love. Further, Clennes is not ascetic, but lovely and glad to be loved. The love of Clennes and Youth represents rather love controlled by reason than repression, the quality that Aristotle called continence and applied to all virtues. The Fourth Book of The Faerie Queene likewise considers chas tity, not as a denial, but as transcendence, of sensuality. Spenser is following Plato according to Picino in the exalta- 65Commentaries, I: 4; lit 2, 9, etc. 66Ibid., II: 7; VI: 9-12, etc. 67Ibid., IV: 6. 200 C Q tion of chastity and the stress on it.00 It does not seem im probable that Hawes had In mind this same virtue of spiritu alized love. It is clear, then that the object of Youth's love is not the Beauty of the Dialogues, but another virtue that is certainly a part of that beauty. Chastity is a means to the realization of the ideal beauty itself. She has divine qualities but she is not herself divine. But Clennes is not the only object of Youth's, or Vertu's desire. He begins by searching for the good life, and for a while this love finds a local habitation in his love for Clennes. But after his marriage to her he turns his eyes toward the heavenly paradise.69 He has a homesickness for heaven, the rightful heritage of the souls. The paradise Hawes describes is immature enough, characterized chiefly by seraphic songs to the Trinity. But in the midst of their observation of this wonder they desire the beauty of God and 7 0 the joy of contemplating Him. Just as the beatitude of contemplation is the consummation of satisfaction after a life dominated by an earthly and then a heavenly love or 66J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry, op. cit., I; 3, and E. de SelTricourt, in the introduction to the Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Oxford Press, London, 1926, 'pp. xlv-xlvi. These two, for example, would support this point. 69E. of V., st. 268. of V., st. 288. 201 yearning, so the Vision is the consummation of the maturing concept of the object of his love. Pure joy is the emotional experience, and pure beauty is its cause. There is bliss in 71 heaven because the eternal contemplation of God has re placed the longing of the aspiring but unfulfilled love for beauty. It is notabie that the only attribute of God that Hawes mentions is his beauty, corresponding to the absolute and eternal beauty of the Platonic and Picinian vision. It is probably what Youth was hunting for in the beginning with out knowing it. The vision of God was the desire of both mystic and scholastic contemplation, for example, in the Xlllth Cen tury, Both the mystics and the schoolmen allowed a place for love in the fulfillment of the vision. But Youth reaches it through an earthly love for a corporeal, beauty. Further, the vision, when it comes, is of beauty, not of the wisdom or will or majesty or mystery of the Trinity. Neither is it the pure intellect and love of The Divine Comedy. It seems to be a part of the changing standards of value of the Renaissance that preferred beauty to truth, and that turned to Plato be cause it considered him to be the exponent of beauty. At the beginning Grand Amour is more conscious and mature lover than Youth, and he realizes earlier In his ex perience transcendent qualities of his beloved. On the other ^1E. of V., st. 289. hand, La Bell Pucel herself is nearer to ideal beauty. Her name suggests her essential quality. Fame tells him at the beginning of his quest that she is beautiful beyond a peer, and that her beauty is above other beauty as the light of the sun is above starlight.Beside her beauty she has also wisdom, virtue, and noble lineage, and she lives in a para disiac garden of joy and bliss. How, and later when he sees her for the first time in the Tower of Music, she seems to have more than earthly beauty. She is superior to all the ladies, contemporary and classical, that he knows about. But she is more than the highest in a finite scale of beauties, and more than simply an example of beauty. We lose sight of her eternal quality while Grand Amour is wooing her, but the heavenly beauty is apparent again at the end when we see her, high above the earth on a craggy rock, in the jewelled court of her castle, “more like a place celestyne than an earthly mansion subject to the ravages of time and dissolution.1,173 Although she is much of the time only an- earthly lady of the conventional courtly love variety, she has the essential qualities that make her a symbol of celestial beauty. Her Platonic qualities are her beauty beyond earthly beauty, her wisdom and virtue identified with her beauty, and her dwell- place beyond time and change. 72ff. of V., st. 289. 75P. of P., 11. 5197-5215 203 Pucel is the consummation of Amour’s experience of beauty. The rest of his life is that of a substantial citi zen, and when the years have been fulfilled he dies a common place death, is remembered by Fame, forgotten in Time, and comes to a final resting place in Eternity. But Eternity is purely a theological concept here. She is Queen of Heaven and Empress of Hell, and reigns over all souls in Heaven and Hell. Hawes gives the advice that if one would spend eter nity in joy he must spend time in virtue, and though we make certain assumptions about Amour’s fate we are not told defi- * 74. nitely which province of Eternity he lives in* Nothing is known about the final beatitude except that it is under the aspect of eternity and is the reward of virtue. These two ideal loves are both of superlative beauty and not quite of this world. They are ’ ’unmoved movers” of those who love them, as Plato said of the highest good when he is thinking less poetically than in the Symposium. They are otherworldly but touching sublunary things. They seem very often to represent an earthly beauty only. But beauty is the only kind of the heavenly visions that is palpable to the sight, and heavenly and earthly beauty are the same.75 It is rather, perhaps, that their beauty remains constant, and the love that is seeking to approach them grows in Its 74P. of P., 11. 5747-5755. 75Phaedrus. 204 ability to understand. For though there is an apparent hier archy among beauties, there is certainly a hierarchy among the loves that desire them. Platonic beauty, however it oc curs, is always a part of the same eternal beauty, but the lovers that desire it must be disciplined to see its essence and not simply its accidents. It is necessary to consider next what this training consists in, how the lover comes from desire to satisfaction. The Idea underlying the necessity for education, as Plato put It in the Phaedrus, for instance, is that the divinity of man has been lost and must be regained. All souls have a divine origin, but some, from inability to control the ' ’bad horse” of sensuality, are weighed down by humanity. The eagerness with which they seek to come again to their heavenly state depends on the vividness and accuracy of their memory of the eternal forms or ideas. Education is a conscious effort of the soul to regain the immediate knowledge of the truth lost through mortality. This discipline takes two routes in Pla to’s thinking, according as he is being practical or poetical but both are to come to the same end. One, outlined in the Republic, is the solid education in specific knowledge;;the other, suggested in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, is the progressive appreciation of more and more idealized forms of beauty. Both of these ways to the Platonic trinity can be traced indistinctly in The Pastime of Pleasure and The Exam ple of Virtue, In the educational process of The Example of Virtue, however, it would be false, to see more than the gen eral principle of the control of all aspects of life by reason. The advice of Discretion; the debate of the four ladles, Nature, Fortitude, Sapience, and Fortune; the opposi tion to the human frailties, sensuality, riches, worldly oc cupation, and vanity; the conquest of the giant named the world, the flesh, and the devil; — all have this purpose. But this was the purpose not only in classical ethics but in scholastic as well, and the way to the beloved is also through the virtues of charity, faith, prayer, and the bless ing of the Church. The Way in The Example of Virtue is chiefly ecclesiastical. The Pastime of Pleasure follows the specific education al system of Plato in many respects. The purpose of the Pla tonic process Is to turn the mind as quickly as possible from darkness into light. The first qualification of the philoso pher king, for whom the education is outlined in the Repub lic, is that he should lead a life of action. Too much edu cation causes apathy, a dwelling apart on an island of the Blessed; and the duty of the philosopher is to serve the in terests of the real world. Grand Amour makes the decision for the active life, instead of the contemplative, at the very beginning, and he presently learns that the good man 206 must do deeds that will be for the common profit. The subject matter of the Platonic education includes *7 training in mathematics, for its moral and metaphysical value rather than wholly for information, and in dialectic or the search for truth by the light of reason. It is not a coincidence, of course, that the Quadrivium includes the same matters as Plato’s mathematical studies, and that the Trivium has a relation to dialectic. However, Hawes makes the seven arts the basis of Amour's education, not because they were derived ultimately from Plato but because they formed a tra dition ready to his hand. Hawes likewise insists on moral value, and uses education, as Plato does, to train the mind to abstract thinking and to make wisdom supreme in the per sonality. In addition to this formal training the philosopher king was given practical experience as a soldier. There is a counterpart to this in Grand Amour's training in chivalry and knighthood. As in Plato's scheme, this training was necessary before he could begin to have an understanding of ideal values and finally take his place in the world of af fairs. The two aspects of Amour's education can be considered much more generally to mean the mental and emotional disci- ^Mathematics includes arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, aril music. 207 pline necessary for the good life. The purpose of the educa tional process in general, in the Republic,ms to strengthen the reason and modify the desire, and these things were ac complished for Amour by his training. He was grounded in knowledge, and his desires were made proof against the temp tations of the world by rational control. Ahe other way to the contemplation of beauty is dis cussed in the Phaedrus and the Symposium. In the Phaedrus Plato simply says that the philosopher is stimulated by par ticular beauty, and finally grows thereby to know transcen dent beauty. In the Symposium the steps in the hierarchy of loves are given in more detail. In youth it is necessary to love one beautiful form above all others and to be stimulated by this beauty to beautiful ideas and conversation. Prom this one love the youth will learn to love all beautiful forms, and then to love the beauty of the mind. If he con tinues to grow he will see intellectual beauty in laws and institutions and science, finally, he will have a vision of a single science of all beauty, the purpose of all our toil and the source of all specific beauty. The ideal consumma tion of this education is the eternal contemplation of pure and absolute beauty. •'•his Way does not appear in its details in Hawes. But the general tendency of Plato’s idea is present. The heroes both love first an earthly and corporeal beauty with a physi cal love. But there is involved in this love also an intel lectual love of qualities of mind like wisdom, purity, hon esty, and virtue. Especially Grand Amour learns also to love the beauty of truth, even apart from specific knowledge, in his labors with the Seven Arts. At the end of The Example Youth, or Vertu, learns to love the pure and eternal beauty of God and to receive beatitude in its contemplation. Two points must be noticed, however. One is that the series of steps is not complete in either poem: the education in in tellectual apprehension of the beauty in knowledge is lacking in The Example of Virtue, and the final vision is lacking in The Pastime of Pleasure. The other point is that the series is not displayed in Hawes. It does not become a series of steps but for the most part appears with logical concurrence. Hawes does not always follow Plato's ordBr of development; the order may be reversed, or several qualities be combined in one experience. There is not much growth; what there is is more marked in The Example than in The Pastime. It is difficult not to find in these parallels a sug gestion of Platonism. Here, as before, there are no really new Ideas. Almost every detail might have come from romance literature or scholastic and mystical Christianity. But their arrangement and combination gives them often a new as pect. If the charting of the path to beauty does show Pla tonic influence, it Is once more that influence, not from 209 specific textual knowledge, but from the less tangible source of common conversation and attitudes built up by a general interest' in an idea. A man could have had ideas about modern humanism in 1928 without ever having read Norman Poerster or Max Eastman. He would have caught the ideas incidentally from conversation and lectures. In the same way, in a London where several prominent men had discovered Plato in Italy, one could have been touched by the periphery of their ideas without having read a page of Picino, to say nothing of Plato. And ideas received in this way would probably suggest only the large outlines, and one would have to use his old fund of knowledge to supply the details. II. THE TWO WORLDS There remains one more Platonic suggestion in Hawes, closely related to the idea of love and beauty but not quite from the same impulse in Plato. This is the idea of the two worlds. It is present, of course, in the earthly and heav enly love and beauty, and in the search of the philosopher for the absolute beauty of which specific beauties are copies, ideas which have just been considered. Plato's dualism, the sharp division between the world of palpable things and the world of archetypical ideas, was one of the points at which Aristotle attacked the Academy the most severely, but the notion was very popular all through the Middle Ages. The ethics and theology of otherworldliness fostered asceticism 210 and the idea of the impermanence and mutability of the world. In this atmosphere, mutability became an evil, but for Plato it was rather a metaphysical consideration, contrasted with the eternal truth of ideas. The world of change is not evil but must be recognized as the shadow of reality and not the final expression of it. In Hawes, mutability becomes the r ? i y most conventional idea possible. The inconstancy of life is stylized into the arbitrary alterations brought about by Fortune to assure humility among men. However, elsewhere Hawes has a very real conception of the contrast and similarity between the two worlds, which he symbolizes in terms of two gardens, and there are several re currences of the Idea. In The Pastime of Pleasure the garden is the home of La Bell Pucel. Beyond the perils that stand between Amour and his beloved, and across "a grate see” /there is a goodly lande Moost full of fruyte/replete with Ioye and blysse Of ryght fyne golde/appereth all the sande In this fayre realme/where the toure dothe stande Made all of golde/enameled aboute With noble storyes/whiche do appere without. 8 The impression is borne out by Amour's closer inspection at the end of his quest.79 He adds It seemed more lyke a place eelestyne Than an erthely mansyon which shall away By longe tyme and process and otherday.80 77P. of P., 11. 3109-75. ?8p. of p., n. 268-273. 79P. of P., 11. 5196-5214. 80P. of P., 11. 5213-5215 211 This garden is partly fairyland and partly an earthly para dise, But he still tells us plainly also that it is more celestial than earthly and more eternal than temporal. It is not of this world hut of heaven. It Is where Pucel lives, so she herself must be accepted as at least partly celestial beauty. In The Pastime there is only one side of the duality. Both occur in The Example in striking relation. In the midst of the courtly love scene wherein the ceremony of Margarete occurs, Youth describes the garden "that longeth to us by In- herytaunce" as a reward for virtuous life.®*- Then, after the marriage of Vertu and Chastity, Vertu, finding himself at the great age of forty and in need of rest, recalls to mind this "solacyous” garden. It is the prototype of her own garden, and he desires to know where it can be. It is heaven, she tells him, which the gospels assure us is ours by inheri- Qp tance, and they will be led there by Raphael. When In due course they arrive there they find it to be paradise Indeed. It contains saints, Vertu1s angel father, and other aigels, and an orthodox trinity; the chief activity is the observai ce of perpetual mass by the singing of celestial "glorias” and 8^E. of V., st. 239-40. The two gardens had azure at mosphere, songs, sweetness, and radiance in common, and the purpose of both was pleasure, on different levels. 82E. of V., st. 268-269. 212 "sancti"; Ptolemaic and astrological oosmic geography pre- 83 vails. But it is the abode of the eternal beauty of God, and it is the reality of which the earthly garden of Pucel was an imitation or shadow. Of course, the idea of the earthly republic as the copy of the heavenly, or, indeed, of the whole temporal world as the copy of another perfect world in heaven, is not con fined to Plato, although the idea as it occurs elsewhere is usually originally Platonic. Origen speaks of an earthly and a heavenly Canaan. The words of Scripture are the type of the eternal, but the eternal gospel is only hinted at, not patent, he says. "The earthly Canaan is the model of the promised land above....u8^ Augustine’s City of God has the same idea: the Church is a copy of the eternal pattern in heaven. During the Renaissance there was renewed interest in patristic writers, and More lectured on Augustine in London Q C in 1501. Hawes1 gardens, earthly and heavenly, are defin itely in the tradition of the thought of the Church. The Platonism in his conception is patristic and may come from 85E. of V., st. 282-287. ^Charles Biggs, Christian Platonist of Alexandria, Oxford, 1913, p. 269. 85&. E. T. S. edition of Nicholas Harpsfield, Life and death of Sir Thomas Moore, London, 1932, p. 13, gives this Bate". ( T . R. Potter, Sir*"Thomas More, London, 1925, pp. 18- 19, says 1497. Roper gives no date. 213 the revived Interest In the Fathers, and specifically, per haps, from the De Clvltate Dei, though what More emphasized in his lecture is not known. However, there is a 'sensuousness about the two patris tic worlds that suggests that Hawes was interpreting them in the light of Ficino's Pandemian and TJranian loves. The ■ ? earthly paradise in The Example of Virtue is a step to the heavenly, not a vile encumbrance, and the sensuous beauty very surely is not despised. In The Pastime of Pleasure the lady whom the hero loves, sometimes-with an earthly love and for her earthly beauty, dwells In a heavenly Paradise which is at the same time an allurement to the senses. It is al ways made clear that this real world is to be preferred to the mutability of the physical world, but the claims of the physical world are not entirely discredited. The desires for the beauty of this world are not to be destroyed but to be outgrown. It is certain that there are Platonic ideas in these two poems, in the conception of love and beauty, the Way to the realization of absolute beauty, and the** duality of the two worlds. The Idea of love and beauty, and of the Way, through progressively abstract beauties, occurs In Ficino's Commentaries on the Symposium. Hawes very often emphasizes the same points that Ficino does, and in the same way. This aspect of his Platonism could have come to him from Ficino 214 by way of the English humanists. The dualism displayed in the poems would take a broader acquaintance with Plato. The idea did not interest Picino much, but it was at the heart of Christianity as it was influenced by the Fathers. Hawes probably got his feeling for the transience and mutability of this world from the popular teaching of the Church. But the freshness of his treatment of the earthly and heavenly gar dens suggests possibly a more direct stimulus of patristic writers and of Picino through contemporary humanists. One further point must be noticed: the Platonism of the two poems is equally well developed. Apart from the fact that Clennes does not represent ideal beauty, as La Bell Pu cel does, The Example of Virtue gives a rather more complete system than The Pastime of Pleasure. This seems to upset the former position that The Example of Virtue, coming early in Hawes1 London life, has less of the humanistic, and more of the religious, influences But this is precisely the reason why there is so much Platonism in it. Christianity, having had much Platonic influence, more easily combines with the new Platonism. Almost a century later Spenser was both the great Platonist and the sensitive Christian. The Pastime of Pleasure contains whatever of the new Aristotle there is to be found in Hawes, and the Platonism did not fuse quite so well with it. CHAPTER III REFORMATION IDEAS IN HAWES During the first decade of the XVIth Century the re formation tendencies in England could not yet be called a conscious movement in the direction of Protestantism or in opposition to the institution or authority of the Church. Savonarola had preached reform in Italy and had died because of his opposition to the Pope. But he wanted reform within the Church, and he defied the Pope because he was not a true successor of Peter. In England, Colet and More preached re form, but they opposed the reformation and never became a part of it. Savonarola and those who, like More, were in fluenced by him, attacked the moral evils of the Church, and the humanists attacked its scholastic philosophy. In 1516, the year of Erasmus1 Novem Instrumentem, Reuchlin’s triumph, and Morefs Utopia, and the year before the appearance of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, the humanists still hoped to ef fect reform without schism and violence.^" Luther's tracts did not appear in Oxford until 1520. It is most improbable, then, that Hawes even had an idea of opposing the institution James Mullinger, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1873, I: 553. 2X6 of the Church, entrenched as he was in conservatism by educa tion. Nor would he be expected to have a consuming interest in vital current problems of reform, being of a literary mind and dependent on the court for his living. But neither does he escape entirely certain ideas that were being consid ered by those with purposes toward reformation, and that later became characteristic attitudes of Protestantism. There is not much that suggests the Reformation spirit in The Example of Virtue and The Pastime of Pleasure. The coincidence of the four temptations in The Example and the Convocation Sermon may bear a repetition, although a common source for the idea has not been found. The Convocation Sermon of 1512 is used by Protestant historians to illustrate Colet’s reformation tendencies, although the convocation was to oppose divergent opinion. It does not place him among the Protestants but among those who desired to reform the Church while preserving it. The occasion was the opening of the convocation of bishops for the extirpation of heresy. The text of the sermon is Romans 12: 1, and the four evil's given to illustrate episcopal conformity to the world are devilish pride, carnal concupiscence, worldly covetousness, and worldly occupation.2 To this there is the parallel in The Example of Virtue, written eight years before, of the per 2J. H. Lupton, Life of John Colet, D. P., London, 1909, pp. 293-304, for text of the sermon. 217 sonified sins which Youth meets as worldly temptations. They are vanity, fleshly pleasure, pride of wealth, and worldly occupation. Except that in Hawes Vanity really comes last, the correspondence is unmistakable. Colet offers the sins to the bishops as points upon which they must reform if the laymen are to be reformed; Hawes makes them evils to be over come before Youth can come to his love. Of course, it is ab surd to suggest that Colet got the four from Hawes, and no common source is apparent, though it- must have existed. But their use by these two men with such different purposes shows again the confusion and overlapping of the old and the new. “The Conuercyon of Swerers" is Hawes* most important foreshadowing of Reformation ideas. But here, as elsewhere in his poetry, and in every line of endeavor during these years, there is a mixture of old and new. Of course, there is no reason to expect that the two should not appear side by side. Many ideas of the Reformation the reformers found ready to their hand, and they simply took over old ideas and used them for their purposes. Many of the new ideas are rec ognized only in historical retrospect as being revolutionary or reformatory, and their ultimate significance probably did not then appear. Hawes uses old ideas for new purposes, and new ideas for old purposes, indeed, and one has a comforting realization of the continuity of racial experience. The subject of the poem, of course, as the title sug- 218 gests, Is the sin of swearing. It was a popular sin to at tack, and the curse of false swearing was a common subject for sermons. The two early XVth Century controversialists, Gascoigne and Pecock, give It attention. Gascoigne, in The 4 Theological Dichotomy, warns people especially against swearing by parts of Our Lord's body, and this was a specific kind of swearing that Hawes much abhorred.® Gascoigne, in common with many of his time, believed the Plague of 1457 to be a judgment brought upon England for its sins in the matter of swearing. Reginald Pecock gives more attention to the commandment against swearing than to all the others, but he, 7 like Hawes, says that It is permissible to swear in court, or in any situation where the purpose is nto give to the good credence.** This principle, that the sinfulness of swear ing was limited to forswearing and blasphemy and had no ap plication to an oath, was generally accepted in the doctrine of the Church and the laws of the state. But false swearing was also a civil offence, and there have been civil laws In 3G. R. Oust, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England, Cambridge, 1930, p.' ‘ 415. ^James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in Eng land , London, 1908, p. 2'6T. 5,tC. of S.,'* st. 12. 6Ponet, edited for the E. E. T. S., by Elsie V. Hitch cock, London, 1921, Part II, Sec. 6. 7ltC. of S.,** st. 20. 219 England against 'blasphemy since 1547 at least. Swearing, then, as Hawes treats it, could be safely and respectably at tacked. On the other hand, the system of swearing, in both its senses, had become complicated and cumbersome in one case, and picturesque and vulgar in the other, and perhaps Q needed sincere efforts at reformation. Several other theological problems, touched casually, receive traditional treatment. Por example, there was the problem of the freedom of the will. uTo do good or yll, all is at thy lyberte,”9 Christ says in "The Conversion of Swear ers.” Hawes does not give unqualified support to the theory of free will, but this phrase, at least, is characteristic of Scotian as opposed to Augustinian theology. Thomas taught that the free will was determined by the intellect and so was not really free. But Duns Scotus made the will quite free, both in God and man. Pecock, for instance, uses the "Doom of Reason and Free Will” as the determinant of conduct,^-0 but he insists that man is saved or damned by his own free will.^ The theological problem in the hands of Augustine and the forhe Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition, in the ar ticle on oaths (XIX: 941-3) gives diverting information. 9"C. of S.,” st. 18 10Polewer, edited for the E. E. T. S., by Elsie V. Hitchcock, London, 1924, chapter 27. ^Reule, edited for the E. E. T. S., by William'Cabell Grant, London, 1927, chapter 18. 220 schoolmen was complex in the extreme, hut to the popular mind, like Pecock’s, it was very clear that man is the author of his own acts and determines his own fate. Hawes qualifies the phrase somewhat, but just here he probably has the de finite and simple idea in his mind, of free will in contrast to the determinism and predestination of Lutheran and Cal vinist ic thought in the Reformation period to come. Another of the old-fashioned attitudes is the idea of vengeance; the idea that God demanded the sacrifice of Christ to propitiate his wrath against man and to make restitution for man's sins. The idea was outgrown at the Reformation: it remained strong in many early Protestant sects, and sur vives to this enlightened day. But the early reformers, like Colet, who would have influenced Hawes, preferred love as an attribute of God, and as a motive in man’s conduct, to retri bution and fear. Hawes makes Christ call upon men to repent and mend, lest He visit them with His wrath. Mercy and peace call for reconciliation between God and man, but truth and righteousness demand the justice of vengeance because of 12 man’s sin of swearing. Colet said that Christ's sacrifice was to redeem man, not' to propitiate God. Idealistically, this was an attitude of the Reformation in opposition to the pre-Reformation idea 12,,C. of S.," st. 19,24,25,41,42. 221 of the desire of God for vengeance. Hawes is very definitely not on the side of the angels here. Christ As a larahe moost meekely dyde enclyne . To suffre the dethe for your redempcyon. He became man and suffered death to redeem man.-1 * 4 The idea is more vivid in negative terms: He has had to save us from the devil once because of our sins, and would again.43 Fi nally, He pleads that He has already suffered enough for man kind, and by that suffering has sealed man’s salvation:46 He has made a bargain, or paid off a debt by His suffering. Of course, ideas like this can be found in any Protestant hymnal to this day, and only a few choice spirits, like Co- let's, perhaps, in Hawes’ time, had any other attitude. So it is not surprising that Hawes follows the old fashion. The fact that he does is only a negative indication of his viewsr he had not been touched at this point by the ideas of Colet and his associates. The whole of Christian thought is figurative even in its purist forms. Much of the symbolism in ’ ’The Conversion of Swearers” remained during the Reformation and is still 43"C. of S.,” st. 10 14”C. of S., st. 25. 45”C. of S.,” st. 15. This was contrary to Colet’s doctrine. J. H. Lupton’s edition of The Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, London, 1873, "pT 14, states that Colet warned against backsliding, because Christ could die only once for our sins. ia,rC. of S.,” st. 43-44. 223 1 q glutony, lechery, and covetousness. Later He has a bless- O A ing for some of the corresponding virtues. ^ Hawes’ per sistence in these old figures shows not only old-fashioned habits of thought but lack of vitality and reality in his thinking. The tendency of the early reformers, such as Erasmus and Colet, was to approve vernacular translations of the Bible, and Tyndale was already working on his translation in 1505. Wyclif and the Lollards and the later true Protestants insisted upon the vernacular Bible for everyone. But Hawes seems to feel that he is giving greater credence if he sup ports his words with quotations from the Vulgate. Once he gives the reading of the commandment against swearing, from Exodus 20: pi Exodi vicesimo. Hon accipies nomen dei Tui in vanum. A He follows it with a free translation of his own. A bit later he says he is quoting nTJnde Ecclesiastici xxxiii,” whatever that may be, to the effect that Vir multum iurans implebitur xniquitate et non discedit a domo eius plaga. 2 19,f0. of S.,f r st. 28. 20"C. of S.," st. 32. 2I,,C. of S.,t t st. 19. 22«C. of S.," st. 24. The Butler edition reads descen- det, for discedit, and omits eius. 222 an inseparable part of Christianity. There is the devil, to suggests .crude figure, and Christ’s physical suffering when His body is torn by our oaths. But the whole idea of the in carnation and the sacrifice for the redemption of man, to mention only the points of doctrine dealt with in "The Con version," is a delicate symbolism essential to Christianity on one level of belief. However, there are certain other adventitious symbolic figures especially characteristic of the later Middle Ages. It is a sort of apocryphal mythological system, the result of the scholastic desire for classification and of a childlike love of allegory and mythmaking. The myths, for the most part, have medieval origins, and the scientific attitude de stroyed them. They are all familiar figures: the seven sins and seven virtues, the three theological and four cardinal virtues, and others. Christ in "The Conversion of Swearers" warns men to avoid the snares of the world, the flesh, and 1 r j the devil. The four Daughters of God are arrayed in their traditional way for and against man’s punishment, and if man does not repent, the delicate balance will be overset, and Righteousness, and Truth will prevail with God instead of * 1 Q Mercy and Peace. ° Among the evils upon which Christ calls down woe are six of the seven sins: pride, envy, sloth, 17,tC. of S.," st. 17, 36. 18"C. of S.," st. 41. 2 m This seems - to mean that "a man swearing often is filled with evil, and misfortune does not depart from his house.” Wheth er this is another mistake like Avicenna’s part IV of the De Anima, or whether Hawes has misquoted the reference one can not tell. There is no thirty-third chapter in Ecclesiastes, and no verse like it in the book. Nor is the passage to be found in the apocryphal book of Zadokite, also called Eccle- siasticus, The Book of The Son of Sirach, although there are 0-2 verses on the subject of oaths. The word of Augustine also adds weight to Hawes* argu ment for holy living and holy dying: "Non potest mali mori qui bene vixit et vir bene moritu qui male vixit.”24 This is a neat epigram: He cannot die ill who lives well, and the - i man is well dead who lives ill. Again, quoting Bernard, he writes, Nonne satis pro te vulneratus sum: nonne satis pro te afflictus sum: desine amplius peccare. (qui) magis aggrauat vulnus peccati (qui) vulnu3 lateris meis.”5 Have I not been wounded enough for you? Have I not been af- ----- -23rT H. Charles, The Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphia of the Old Testament,lh.English, Oxford, 1913, II: 799-834. For example: ix: 12-B; ix: 34-39-B; xix; xx. These passages con tain references to oaths and swearing, the importance of keeping oaths, and the sin of swearing falsely, but the verse quoted by Hawes is not in the Book. ^"C. of S.,1 1 st. 25. of S.,” st. 42. In the text qui in both cases is represented by the usual symbol employed by manuscript writ ers and early printers. 225 flicted enough for you? Cease sinning more* Who makes greater the wounds of sin makes greater the wounds in my side. These quotations show a commendable scholastic impulse to adduce authority to the support of his own ideas. They are also a sort of grandiose rhetorical device to give the effect of scholarship. Perhaps Hawes was nurturing his repu tation as a man of learning. At least he could follow the example of his "mayster Lydgate," who, he observes, ....dyde bothe contryve and also translate- Many vertues bokes to be in memory 6 Quotation from the Vulgate and from Bernard is a con servative impulse. Augustine was a favorite text of Luther, but Colet and Erasmus preferred earlier patristic writers: Ambrose, Cyprian, Jerome, and Origen.27 And Hawes certainly does not quote Augustine for the same reason that Luther would. All four of his quotations are apparently familiar and isolated texts popularly employed against swearing. They are used without reference to their context, with scholastic confidence in verbal inspiration and the absolute value of every word of sacred scripture. It was this attitude that Colet opposed in his interpretation of Paul’s epistles, and 26t,C. of S.st. 4. ^Frederick Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, London, 1869, Section IV, chapter 5. 226 Erasmus, in his introduction to Laurentius Valla’s Annota tions upon the Hew Testament. Hawes continues to hold the same theory of poetics as in the other poems. His purpose is expressly didactic: like clerks of antiquity he hopes to give . ........ an example of good moralytie To folowe the trace of trouth and ryghtwysnes. Because he remembers his own frail youth, he is moved to write against the cruel sin of swearing, to enlighten his p Q readers. He still believes that the nentencyon” should be Cloked in ooloure harde in construecyon, and that .poetes under cloudy fygures „ (should cover] the trouthe of all theyr scrypture. u It has been shown that both the cloudy figures and didac ticism are old-fashioned habits. Hawes’ primary lesson in the poem is that men should do the will of Christ in the matter of swearing. However, he has a couple of secondary points that he hopes will not be forgotten. He exhorts himself "at the beginning to leave Hydlenesse the grete moder of aynne,”3- * * and at the close of the poem he feels that he has accomplished this purpose, at least while he was engaged in writing.32 In the course of 28ttC. of S.," st. 2. 29,1 C. of o n f st. 6,8. 30”c. of s.," s t. 2. 31nC. of S.," st. 7. 32,1 C. of s .,n st. 42. 227 the poem he again warns the reader away from sloth.33 This sin is not so prominent in t t The Conversion of Swearers0 as in the other poems, but it is still the one he fears most for himself. The other danger he warns the reader against is the allurement of the world and its mutability. Avoid the snares of the world, the flesh, and the devil, he admonishes.3^ Woe worth short joy, for who is a greater fool than he who enjoys the vain pleasures of the world for a season, but endures 35 eternal pain. And who is wiser than he who suffers the pain of the world so that he may see Christ in eternity?36 Regard no joy of this transitory earth, Christ advises, for eternity is at stake.37 The world did not cease to be denied at the Renaissance, but otherworldliness is not typical of that time. Hawes is again keeping an old attitude. The theme of the sin of swearing, the treatment of the theological problems of restitution, free will, and vengeance the use of figures like the seven vices and the four daugh ters of God, quotation from the Vulgate, consideration of the sin of idleness and the snares of the world, the literary theory of covering the meaning with cloudy figures, these are 33tlC. of S.,u st. 28. 35t*C. of S.,” st. 29. 57”C. of S.,« st. 39. 34,tC. of S.,u st. 17 36l,C. of S.,t t st. 37-38. 228 all medieval attitudes. They were prevalent also in the Renaissance, but they were conservative and came from the past. Hawes sometimes meets these old problems in new ways typical of the Reformation, and again uses old matter in new situations, in ways that transform it. For instance, the evil he attacks is old; the way he offers for correcting it is new. Our next task, therefore, is to consider the more lib eral ideas that look ahead to the Reformation. In the first place, the poem attacks an evil to reform it. It is possible that the sin of swearing may have been something more than an obsolete windmill to receive his blows: the age was notoriously rough, and insincerity is 38 always with us. Howevey, this is not the sort of* reformation the re formers were usually concerned about. Swearing is a sin for Hawes because there has been a commandment against it, and breaking it is displeasing to Christ. The reformers very often attack theological problems: Luther attacked the Church along the line of the means to salvation. But whether they were attacking political corruption and personal evils, like Savonarola; the worldliness of the clergy, like Colet; the ignorance and folly of churchmen, like Erasmus; or the au thority of the Church itself in the validity of indulgences, 38por example, Preserved Smith, Age of The Reformation, New York, 1920, pp. 451-507. 229 like Luther; the reformers made their claims for reform upon humanistic, not theological, grounds. They set themselves against an evil because it was destroying human values, and not, as Hawes does, because it creates an imaginary annoyance in heaven. Celestial harmony may be an excellent state to maintain, and it was important to the medieval mind, but the Renaissance reformers were concerned with the problems of the sublunary world. Even for Hawes the sin of swearing involved more than an artificial problem. False swearing is an attack upon sin- cerity and truth, he observes. In attacking falsehood he Is attacking a very fundamental evil that was not greatly stressed until the scientific attitude made the idea of ob jective truth important. But falsehood as he considers it is a personal problem and does not involve the Church and church men as such, as did the moral problems of the Reformation. Hawes does not base his attack upon swearing on its effect upon men but on its effect on Christ. However, in the year of "Elinor Ruraminge” and "Philip Sparrowe," "The Bouge of Court," "The Shipe of Fooles," and The Praise of Folly, a poem with a serious moral purpose and without satire may be said to have the mark of the reforming spirit, and the moral intransigeance of the reformers. Again 39"C. of S.," st. 21 2J30 Hawes seems to be influenced by a general mood or purpose in his contemporaries that does not determine his course in de tail. The conservative reformers before the Reformation, like Thomas Gascoigne, for example, appealed always to Rome to reform abuses. Even Colet's Convocation Sermon, and be fore that, the Lectures on Corinthians in 1497, have the same purport. The bishops are to reform, so that they may be a fit example for the layman to follow. Radical reformers, however, denied this mediate office of the Church as a moral guide, along with the whole system of its spiritual author ity. Their only guide was the example of Christ and the Dis ciples. Colet himself, by his admiration for Paul, and by his expressed plea in the lecture on Corinthians^0 that people should follow the example of Christ, places himself among the reformers on this point. The evils of the Papal court at Rome, as much as any conviction about the Bible as the true source of light, forced people to look outisde the institu tion of the Church for guidance. Hawes has no word to say about the clergy or the Church. Their attitude about swearing is hardly suggested in "The Conversion.” It is a matter of discovering the will of Christ and following it. Christ is the only example, and the ^°Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., Sec. II, ch.5. 231 only One that man is called upon to please. Hawes considers Christ’s plea, "I want you to amend,rt4^ the strongest incen tive to reform that he can give. Here he has thoroughly the attitude of the Reformation. There is no sense of the mediation of the Church and its system of saints. A personal relationship exists be tween Christ and the Christian, and His appeal is made di rectly to men. The whole poem is a continuous example of this direct and personal relationship. Christ died for in- 4-P dividual men, & He still suffers for their 3ins, and every An. wound tears Him. ^ On the other hand, He expects from men, a personal loyalty44 that attaches directly to His own life and has nothing to do with the Church or auxiliary individ uals therein. He asks for a personal love from His fol lowers. "Come unto me and cast your synnes adowne," He says. 0 How this seems to be the heart of Protestantism. The function of the Church' is entirely omitted, and the process of theological and moral salvation is completed when the in dividual accepts Christ’s grace. • It is only necessary for man to love Him and follow His example; there is nothing else 41"C. of S.,n st. 15. 42"C. of S.," st. 10, 43. 43uC. of S.,” st. 43, 16, 40. 44”C. of S.," st. 21, 40. 45"C. of S.,M st. 45. 232 for the good life. Man can go to Christ and cast his "synnes adowne," without the aid of sacrament or priesthood, and so will he escape condemnation. Every man is his own priest, and he in his simplicity and sin can approach Christ and have salvation. Erasmus says, in the Encheiridion, that every man can conquer sin if he seeks and accepts the aid of Christ. To scholasticism the way to God was through knowledge. Thomas includes love and right willing along with knowledge, but knowledge has preeminence in salvation. So it had had for Hawes earlier. We have noticed the importance of wisdom or sapience in The Example of Virtue, and of doctrine and her seven arts in The Pastime of Pleasure. Colet and Erasmus disliked the subtleties of scholastic doctrine and found the essence of Christianity only in love of Christ.4® This is the point of view that Hawes takes in "The Conversion of Swearers. Love of beauty was important in the first two poems," but only twice does Hawes consider it in the relation between Christ and man. In The Example of Virtue47 he says that if man loves Christ and follows certain prescriptions regarding virtue and chastity he may experience eternal bliss. The same idea occurs in The Pastime of Pleasure.4® But in "The 4®Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. oit., Sec. IV, ch. 5. 47E. Of V., St. 292. 48P. of P., 11. 5747-5755. 233 Conversion of Swearers** the importance of love in salvation is the main thesis, in spite of the fact that he begins with the conventional premise that “science** is the most important 49 thing in life. Christ says that no one has loved men so much as He,59 and gives as proof the wounds He has suffered for them. In return for this love man is ungrateful and cruel.®-** The plea in general is that men shall give the same love to Christ that He gives to men, and if they love Him they will do His bidding.52 This is the whole solution to the moral problem. The supreme importance of love is the conclusion one could come to from a dispassionate reading of the New Testa ment, and the condition just quoted is directly Inspired by John 14:15: “If ye love me ye will keep my commandments.** These attitudes carried over into the thinking of Colet and Erasmus and later Protestants, from their zeal for the Hew Testament. Sin, Colet says, can be overcome by the accep tance of the grace of Christ1s sacrifice, that is, of the love of God. The grace unto salvation is the love of Christ or God for man# On the other hand, man must return this 49* * : c . of S.,“ st. 5 50hc# of s<ft t s t m 25,etc. 51“C. of a.,“ st. 40. 52”C. of S.,“ st. 21. ^Lupton’s edition of the text of the Expostion of Romans, pp. 7-13. 234 love if he is to he saved. Love is better than knowledge of God, says Colet. To love God is more seemly than to presume to know God, and it is the only way for human beings to re alize divinity. Anyone may love, but all are limited, in different degrees, in knowing, God. Love is more important than faith and hope, as Paul says in the famous passage.5^ Hawes agrees with the early reformers, then, in these two Protestant attitudes; he believes that the Christian must establish a personal relationship with Christ, immediate and complete, and must be bound to Him by a personal loyalty, without the intercession of any institution or lesser beings; and that the relationship must be based on love on both sides; man must match Christ’s love by his own in an emo tional, not an intellectual, self-surrender. Following upon these two is the conclusion that the example of Christ’s life is the chief guide for a Christian’s conduct. Interest in the primitive Church, in the ideas of Paul and the disciples, and in the life of Christ are characteris tics of the Reformation and of Protestant movements in gen eral. De Wulf and Seebohm unite in saying that the return to the teachings and lives of Christ and the disciples as the only guides for conduct is a mark of the Reformation.55 Co- 54lbid,pp. 31-40. 55De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, London, 1926, II: 280. Seebohm, Protestant Revolution, London, 1869, ch. 2. 235 let pleads, in the lectures on First Corinthians, that people should follow the example of Christ to the righteous life. More translates Pico’s poems, which display Christ*s example c ry as an incentive to duty and the good life. ' "The Conversion of Swearers” is as a whole a plea for men to ohey Christ: if ye love me and my justice, ye would obey my bidding; am I not more to be obeyed than earthly kings; hear my word; amend or I take vengeance.5® Some of the beatitudes that are recommended to men are virtues from the New Testament, like humility and truth, but most of them have to do only with a denial of the world and its pleasures. However, one of them calls those blessed who "follow the trace" of Christ, and this is a direct plea to men to use His example as a guide to conduct. The readers are urged to as sume the character of Christ as reformer, not only toward their fellows but toward all the vicious. There is not a great deal of stress on the idea that Christ is the only ex ample, but it is there. However, the doctrines He sanctions and the virtue He blesses show that He is not always the Christ of the New Testament, 55Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op. cit., Sec. II, eh. 5. 57Ibid., Sec. IV, ch. 4; English Work3 of Sir Thomas More, edited by W. E. Campbell and it. W. Reed,"London, 1931, l7“385 and 388. 58”C. of S.,” st. 21, 22, 39, 42. 236 One of the methods of reform recognized in "The Con version of Swearers" is preaching. My prelates preach to you, Christ says, but your hearts are too hard to be touched by their words.®0 During the XVth Century preaching was at a low ebb in -^ngland*®^ The plan arid the matter of the ser mon were stylized, and preaching was especially handicapped by the idea of the verbal inspiration of the scriptures and the resulting disjointed and allegorical interpretation. Priests were careless, ignorant, and corrupt more frequently than usual, although Catholic interpreters of the period, like Gasquet and Gairdner, modify this condemnation.®^ In any case, Archbishop Morton probably did much to improve things during the reign of Henry VII.®3 At least, the re vival of preaching w$s a mark of reformation. The Lady Mar garet professorship in vernacular preaching, founded at Cam bridge in 1503, is an academic recognition of a need and a tendency, and the popular preaching of Savonarola and Colet provide particular instances of the revival. It should be remembered as well that the effort at reformation a hundred ®°"C. Of S.,f l st. 27. ®%ullinger, University of Cambridge, op. cit., I* 437. Skelton satirized poor preaching in "Replycacions." ®^Gasquet, P. A., Eve of the Reformation, London, 1905, chapter 9. ®3Gairdner, o£. cit., p. 268. 237 years before in England bad been accompanied by the preaching of Wyclif and hundreds of his poor priests. Emphasis on preaching in a serious reformatory spirit, with Biblical mat erial prominent, seems to be an inseparable part of reforma tion and the Reformation.®^ It is true, Hawes blames the ineffectiveness of preaching upon the hard hearts of the hearers and not on the inability of the prelates. But the fact that he could recog nize preaching as an important means of reformation shows a certain awareness of new attitudes, and he must be pardoned the conservatism that made him blind to the need for reform in the preaching itself. Nor is it very probable that he had such preaching as Golet's in mind. Swearing, was a favorite subject for medieval sermons, but reforming preachers at tacked more serious sins to reform them. However, he Is a reformer in so far as he is aware of the importance of preach ing. More translated the life, four letters, and some poetry of Pico della Mirandola In 1504-5, and they were printed about 1510, by his brother-in-law, John Raatell. "Thoughts on the Religious Life," a prose piece, emphasizes the importance of the love for God over the knowledge of God. The poetry presents the love and sacrifice of Christ as mo- ®4Edwin C. Dargan, History of Preaching, New York, 1905, I: 331-367. 238 tivation for the good life, and shows a suffering Christ In f ! C emotional and sensuous terms. Hawes1 Insistence in ”The Conversion of Swearers” on love in the relationship of man and Christ has already been noted. The sensuous note is also very prominent in the poem. Heaven and Hell are considered in terms of pleasantness and pain, but that is a conventional point of view. One needs to go no farther than Dante for examples. The most vivid ap peals to the senses have to do with Christ’s sufferings. There is no reticence. He has become man and suffered death for our redemption, and still, by swearing, men see His body torn and hang Him on the cross again.68 The metrical experiment in the poem insists upon the wounds of Christ and pleads that they shall not be made worse by swearing. Man’s hatred and cruelty are shown in the way he tears the wounds SQ by his sins; Christ has sealed our salvation by His suffer ing, but we do not hesitate to break the seal and break open His wounds by our evil ways.70 Religious poetry before this had been sensuous. For 66Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, op, cit., p. 157. Ibid., IV:4, and The English lorK o? Sir Thomas More, op. cit., I: 347-396, for More’s worE^ with Pico. 66,fC. of S.,” for example, 16, 37. 67”C. of S.,‘ * st. 10, 23. 68t»C. of S.," st. 12, 13. 69,tC. of S.,t t St. 40, 43. 70,,C. Of S.,t t st. 44. 239 instance, Occleve’s poems to the Blessed Mary have flesh and tears in thein, and thinking about religion in terms of sense is characteristic of some of the mystics*7* - .However, sens- ous consideration of Christ*s suffering is not as usual as love for Christ and the Virgin, so expressed. At least, it is significant that after a hundred years from which survives little religious poetry outside of drama, these two poems, by Hawes and Pico, offering a parallel in sensuous tone, should appear at nearly the same time. One of the chief doctrinal controversies of the Re formation centered around free will. It is a confused mat ter to the best minds. Thomas says that predestination is absolutely in the hands of God, and thsfc man’s fate is deter mined not by his merit but by God’s will and mercy.7^ On the other hand, man’s will is quite free,73 and with this view of Thomas Duns Scotus concurs. This Is the point of view most persistent in XVth Century theo'logy.74 At the other side stands the strict determinism of Augustine, and Lutheran and Calvinistic doctrine characteristic of the Reformation. Be tween the two extremes is the modified attitude of Colet, for 7%. .0. Taylor, Medieval Mind, London, 1927, Vol. I, ch. 20, on ascetic women, for example. 72Summa Theologica, I: 23. 73Ibid., IV: 83. 74Cf. Pecock. See p. supra. 240 7*5 example, and that of Savonarola. Colet, In his comment on Romans 3; 5-8 and 22, says that Cod foreknows man’s wicked ness, but the wickedness does not come from God’s foreknow ledge. Sin comes from man’s nature, foreknowledge from God’sj they are two aspects of the same fact * but do not 76 cause each other. God offers the means to salvation in Christ’s sacrifice and redemptive power, and man is saved* not by his merit, but by freely accepting those means of grace and loving God. It is really God’s love, then, that 7*7 saves man. Salvation is by free election of God, and man contributes nothing to it but his love and his choice of the means of grace. Still man is a free agent, his will being accompanied by God’s, not caused by it. Hawes accepted the old-fashioned idea of freedom. However, this does not express the whole of his attitude. Like Colet, he says that Christ, by His sacrifice, has pro vided a place for man in paradise if he will only receive it.78 Christ will grant grace to man to subdue the world, the flesh, and the devil, and it is man’s part only to accept it. So, ”to do good or yll, all is at his lyberte.u79 75Villari, Life and Times of Savonarola, London, 1898, I: 114; Seebohm, Oxford- Reformers, dpT cit., p. 21. 76Lupton’s edition of Exposition of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, London, 1873, pp. 5-7. ■ ' 77Ibid. , pp. 7-13. 78ttC. of S. ,t t st. 16. 79”C. of S.,1 * st. 18. 241 Man’s course is determined in so far as he must accept Christ’s love and grace as the means to his salvation, hut he is free because he can accept or not as he will. This is not far from the modified determinism of Colet and Savonarola but it does not accept so much of determinism as their posi tion does. In general, Hawes' poetry has more of XVth Century theology than of the Reformation. But ther.e are points at which he touches the attitude of contemporary liberals. Some of these may be simply coincidences. For instance, in addi tion to the parallel between the Convocation Sermon and The Example, there is the general interest in the Creation, shown in Pico’s Heptaplus and Colet’s letters to Radulf, for example. But these discussions are Platonic, not an astro logical, transformation of Genesis, like Hawes’ account in The Pastime of Pleasure.80 But there are other points, especially in f ’The Con version of Swearers,1 * that seem definitely to show the In fluence of the reforming thought of Colet, More, Erasmus, and Savonarola, and these will be reviewed in brief summary. Hawes is dealing with a problem of reform, although it is a sin that concerned people in the XlVth and X¥th Centuries, ^°P. of P., 11. 2696-2730. Hawes shares his interest also with Pecock, Renle, II: 19, and John Thoresby, Lay Folks’ Catechism, edited for the E. E. T. S., London7""T901. rather than the XVIth. The reformation was to come by men following the example of Christ, not through the means of the Church. There is a personal relationship between Christ and the Christian: Christ himself pleads with men, and there is no mediation of the Church. The most important aspect of this relationship is the mutual love of man and Christ. Man is saved by his love, not by his doctrine, and his love is what makes him follow the will of Christ. The example of Christ’s character and His will are the only guides to right conduct that Hawes suggest; His authority is supreme. How ever, there is the amusing anachronism of Christ quoting Ber nard and Augustine in support of His own teachings, and really much of His ethics in the poem is not eminently Chris tian. But even in Hawes’ attitude toward free will he goes part way to determinism, as did Colet. Hawes, in his religious thinking as in his humanism, seems to have been touched by the new ideas of his contemp oraries. No verbal parallels or examples of definite imita tion have been discovered. But the influence is present in his general point of view and in his attitudes toward broad problems, the sort of influence, again, that comes from lis tening to sermons and participating in conversations in which such ideas occur. Certainly Hawes is no conscious reformer, though he is always intentionally didactic, and he is con servative at more points than he Is liberal. But there Is 243 unmistakably a spark here of* the conflagration to come. CHAPTER IV RENAISSANCE POINTS OP VIEW IN HAWES The Renaissance Is characterized by the revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and by'reformation in re ligion, and these attitudes have been discussed in their rela tion to Hawes* poetry. However, there are other ideas un connected directly with the philosophy of the schools which must still be considered as being characteristic of Renais sance thinking. Certain of these grow out of some tradi tional philosophy that the Renaissance chose to follow, and that had an effect upon the practical attituds of men. But usually these attitudes developed the other way round: they grew out of the kind of life that the man of the Renaissance was living. Of course, lives were diverse, but there were certain generally dominant tones and attitudes. And these attitudes, growing out of the active life, are quite as much a part of Renaissance philosophy as the philosophy that is the product of the contemplative life, the study, and the ideas of the past. Indeed, the distinction between the contemplative and the aetive life is at once an obvious and a profound distinc tion between the old and new mind. The contemplative life had Aristotle and his disciple Thomas as its supporters in 245 philosophy. Aristotle says that the highest function of man is intellectual activity, and from this it was easy enough for Thomas to conclude that the vita contemplatfva on earth, and ultimately, the contemplation of God in a future life, constitute the ideal happiness of man.^ Of course, it would be idle to suggest that this philosophy sets the tone of all the life of the Middle Ages. But scholasticism and the mystics, monasticism and asceticism, show that the contempla tive life was looked upon as the good life by the dominating institution of the time. This might be considered the characteristic philo sophical attitude of the XlVth Century. In the XVth Century some relaxation was allowed. Pecoek, for instance, says that the contemplative And the active life go hand in hand, the one being a preparation for the other, and both are present in heaven.2 When one is dealing in large terms, one of the safer generalizations to make is to contrast the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from the point of view of the active and con templative life. The contrast is borne out in several points. The special success of exploration and trade, the dominance of strong personal governments, the humanistic at- -*-For example, Summa Contra Gentiles, III: 37, and Sumraa Theologica, III; 171-189. 2Reule, V: 1-4. 246 titude toward learning, the spread of popular education, in terest especially in plastic and space arts, progress in science and material comfort, — such things indicate the ac ceptance of the active life. There is always the danger that one is simply choosing the active aspects of the Renaissance and winking at the contemplative, and it is possible that one could reverse the contention and hold the same brief for the Middle Ages. But the general trend of thinking, as well as its overt concommitant in practical life, seems to be on the side of contemplation and otherworldliness in the Middle Ages, and active and physical experience during the Renais sance. The turn to the objective life of action can be seen in typical individual careers as well. The versatile life of Benvenuto Cellini is an illustration to the point. He was adept in several of the arts, successful in scientific in vestigation, active in politics, and his own rule for con duct seems to have been an immediate pragmatic sanction and the test of present pleasure. In England Henry VII shows another kind of active life. He was a thrifty business man, and aimed at a strong central government, he sponsored mer cantilism and exploration and saw the value of material pros perity to England. The prominent men in the opening years of the century, like Colet, More, and Wolsey, were men of af fairs as well as scholars and churchmen. Churchmen in former 247 years were very oftn politicians and business men. But in More, for instance, the choice is conscious and deliberate. Attention has already been given to his subjective struggle in 1505, when he had to make a choice between Carthusian as- cetism and the world of polities and family responsibilities. It is pleasant to consider his choice of the active, instead of the contemplative, life as typical of Renaissance experi ence, individual and collective. Hawes makes a symbol of this choice and puts it into the life of Grand Amour. At the beginning of his life of learning and aspiration Amour decides that his efforts and desires are to be directed toward the active life, the way of worldly dignity, fame, and La Bell Pucel. The means he later uses to this end are not always consonant with his early in tentions, but his final achievement on earth is expressed in terms of wealth, plac^ and fame. Grand Amour, in the broad lines of his conception and fulfillment, is a man of the Renaissance, and Hawes is in sympathy with him. Another characteristic of Renaissance personality, especially in Italy, was its versatility. A man was to be accomplished in every line, and the standards suggested in such books as Castiglione1s Courtier seem impossible of at tainment. One was to have physical strength and athletic proa^ess, be intellectually alert and learned in philosophy and in classical and modern literature, be master of the 248 technique of* not one but several arts, including poetry, music, and some plastic art or craft, he was to know his way about in the world and be able to contend successfully in politics, he must be the glass of fashion, an'ideal lover, and informed about masques and tournaments, and he must be *Z virtuous and of noble birth. Men really sought and to some extent achieved that sort of a personality, and the universal genius of Benvenuto Cellini is an exception not in kind but in degree. "The Courtier had not yet been written, and it was well into the XVIth Century before the enthusiasm for the gentle man therein described reached England.^ Henry VII was inter ested in Italianism, but courtly poetry developed In a circle of courtly poets, Italian courtiers like Ammonio, in the household of More, and Oxford men who had been to Italy. This movement began in earnest in the 20*s: Sir Thomas Wyatt, for instance, came back from Italy in 1527. It is customary to contrast this courtly poetry with the work of Hawes. The Courtier as a personal and literary ideal came into promi nence toward the reign of Elizabeth and thereafter, and the ^Lewis Einstein, Italian Renaissance in England, New York, 1902, pp. 58-115. ^Written 1514, printed by Aldus in 1528, translated into English by Thomas Hoby in 1561. ^Einstein, cit., pp. 316-372, especially p. 320. 249 criticism of Italianism by Ascham, Cheke, and Wilson came in the middle of the XVIth Century. There were certain changes in the conception of the ideal courtier, too. Learning be came more important, and the tendency toward democracy in creased at the end of the century. Whoever could act like a gentleman and had studied the liberal arts or had been at the university should be taken for a gentleman. Learning, civility, and virtue became the tests. The interest in such a courtier is supposed, then, to have developed in the middle years of the XVIth Century. However, although they would not have had the definite lit erary example of Castiglione, Englishmen could have had a concept of the Italian ideal of a gentleman before that. There were Italians at the English court and in London before the end of the XVth Century, and the Oxford men in Italy in the last two decades of the Century probably learned some thing beside humanism. For Grand Amour certainly has many characteristics of the Italian concept of ideal personality. In the first place, his education is to give him an all-round development. His intellectual training is emphasized, but he also learns the use of arms and acquires physical prowess. He learns to be a musician and does well as a lover. He learns to love beauty, but also to be an example of virtue. It is true that his learning is inclined to be scholastic; his manifestations 250 of the art of love are chiefly in the courtly love mode; and his feats of arras are chivalric, not athletic or recreational. But this eclecticism is characteristic of Hawes and his times: old matter is used for new purposes and old forms ex press new ideas. Here, as elsewhere, he used the material that he had at hand and understood to clothe a new idea some times not too clearly perceived. The importance of noble birth declined with the ad vance of the century, as has been pointed out, and learning, civility, and virtue became the signs of a gentleman. G-rand Amour is a prior example of this democratic tendency. He had no family to recommend him: La Bell Pucel is of noble birth, but he has nothing but his own personality to offer. He never of his own will brings up the question of his family and simply does his best to justify himself by the strength of his own virtue and learning. This recognition of the value of personality for its own sake, and the self-confi dence that comes from the consciousness of individual dignity and value are characteristic of Renaissance thinking, both jtfiilosophical and practical. Council and La Bell Pucel re mind Amour of his low birth and poverty.6 The answer of Council is that Pucel has enough wealth and nobility for both, and of Pucel, that'she loves him. But the answer of the 6P. of P., 11. 1849-1855, and 2052-2295. Specific passages will riot often be referred to in this chapter. Most of the references have been mentioned several times before.. 251 poem is that Amour is worthy on his own account because of his training and real worth, and therefore may he equal to any one. If he can show that he has learning, virtue, and manners he is accepted as a gentleman in his own right. The requirements of learning, civility, and virtue are the purposes of Amourfs training. He has studied the liberal sciences, as was the Italian demand; he is1 given much moral instruction and spends much effort in the improvement of his character; although it is not probable that the Italian ideal stressed quite the virtues that he did; he turns his attention, at the suggestion of Chivalry and Venus, to his civility, though it Is not in his formal manners but In his virtue and sensitive good taste in general that he shows his breeding. He is at home in a diversity of situa tions: in the schools, on horseback in the wilderness, in courts of nobility, facing an opponent In combat, courting a lady In a formal garden, and finally as a gentleman of wealth and position In his own household. Everywhere he makes his way solely by the strength of his own worth and aspiration. In spite of his many practical moods, there is something about him unreal and like a fairy tale, but so is there about the versatile ideal of the Renaissance. The converse of the insistence upon the active and many-sided life is the denial of asceticism. Stated posi tively, it is the acceptance of the world as a good, perhaps 252 the good; and otherworldliness has little importance as ac tual motivation for conduct. There is enough verbal denial of the world with its fellows the flesh and the devil, in The Pastime of Pleasure, to say nothing of The Example of Virtue, but the denial is really only verbal. Grand Amour’s training is for life and the active sensuous world, not for a life after death. He wanted love and fame, not salvation; and love and fame are what he got. He seems to be heedless of his eternal life, and the writer gives it only the perfunc tory attention that convention would demand. Amour gets a great deal of satisfaction out of the ex periences of this world. He has intellectual curiosity about knowledge and a zest for the physical experience of fighting. He is awake to the .material world he rides through, the con tour of the land, the water, vegetation and animals, although they are often conventionalized in the mode of Bartholomaeus. He and Youth as well enjoy gardens and make the dwelling place of their ideal beauty in such an image. They both love beauty and desire it with an ambiguous desire that is some times spiritual but sometimes also physical. Amour is faced with problems regarding his attitudes and conduct, but they.are intellectual, moral, and metaphysi- ca.1, and not strictly theological He must find the truth, attain to virtue and seek after ideal beauty, but he is not concerned with the means of grace unto eternal life. Even in 253 The Example of virtue, where the consummation is other worldly, the otherworldliness has significance for truth and beauty, and as fulfillment of earthly experience. There is otherworldliness, of course, in both poems. In fact, it is really the dominating impression. But the otherworldliness is Platonic rather than Hebraic, metaphysi cal rather than temporal. The salvation that the hero wants is a matter of values under the aspect of eternity, and he can experience them in the world as well as beyond it. This is especially evident in The Pastime. The hero of The Pastime of Pleasure, and to some ex tent of The Example of Virtue, then, reflect the ideal per sonality of the Renaissance in his active life, in his well- rounded personality, and in his love of the world. He is not consistent in following the Renaissance pattern, but he exemplifies it in flashes and from certain points of view. In ”The Conversion of Swearers1 * an appeal is made to the king and his nobles to lead the way in the movement against sv/earing. It might be possible to think of this com pliment to a promising young king as a part of the new ten dency toward nationalism and a recognition of the personal strength of individual sovereigns. It is at least a recogni tion of the personal strength of Henry VIII and shows a de gree of national pride, and these tendencies are probably more marked in ”The Joyful Meditation.” However, they are 254 not marked enough to make a point of them as examples of Renaissance nationalism and individualism. Hawes may have thought only of paying the new king a handsome compliment at the same time that he was giving him advice about his conduct and his court. Hot many lives of Englishmen during the first ten years of the XVIth Century are well-known. However, those about whom we know details show some curious parallels with points in Hawes’ poems. The few slight hints of similarity may mean background and experience which are the same at some point, or they mean mutual intercourse. They suggest as well how limited any consideration of. influence and sources must be because data are so few. The events and ideas that in fluence a man’s writing most probably go unrecorded, and much that may, by some good fortune, have been once recorded, is lost. Any sort of scientific conclusion seems obviously im possible when so very few of the whole sum of pertinent facts are available. This must be true when one considers that upon only a superficial glance the lives of two or three very different contemporaries, the churchman Colet, the statesman More, and the poet Hawes, are found to cross at so many points. The parallels with Colet and Erasmus are chiefly in doctrine, and these have been discussed before. For Hawes, in "The Conversion of Swearers," as for Colet, grace, love, 255 and the example of Christ were most important in salvation, and the two hold somewhat the same views on the freedom of the will. Then there is the strange similarity of The Exam ple of Virtue to the Convocation Sermon. It must he due to a common source for both which the writer has not been able to find. The four sins seem to be medieval, and probably all that the parallel indicates is that the authors were exposed to the common source. Erasmus also held many of the doctrines that Colet did regarding the exclusive importance of the example of Christ as a guide for conduct. He shared with him as well an inter est in new attitudes toward education. Both of them believed in the value of humanistic-studies and religious training and considered that the purpose of education was the training for right conduct. Erasmus’ theoretical aim for education was to develop piety, learning, morals, and manners.7 This is the XVIth Century English ideal of the gentleman, with the addi tion of piety. The moral seriousness of Hawes’ educational process is always foremost. Both of his heroes are educated before our eyes, and Erasmus’ four requisites are the fields in which they seek perfection. Hawes was at least somewhat touched by the current educational theories that demanded education for life and development of many abilities. 7Groves, History of Education, New York, 1912, II: 14. 256 The life of More presents perhaps the most interesting similarities. Most prominent is his determination for the active life, instead of the contemplative life of asceticism, which came during the same year that Hawes was writing The Pastime of Pleasure with its similar decision. The English works of More, written between 1503 and 1505, contain several equally striking parallels. About 1503 More wrote a series of stanzas to accompany some tapestries in his father’s house. The details of the poem have been O given before. It described pictures setting forth eight stages in the life of man: boyhood, youth, middle life of love, old age, death, fame, time, and eternity. The Pastime of Pleasure begins with the youth, not the boyhood of Grand Amour. The main part of the poem deals with his amorous mid dle life. Then when he has achieved his love the poem has tens over the subsequent stages in a sort of epilogue.® Old age claims him and he lives in affluence and power. But death pursues and overtakes him in the midst of his wealth, he dies with the blessing of Holy Church, and is buried. Fame promises to make him known forever. Hawes’ figure of Fame, like More’s, is encompassed about with ’ ’brennynge 8Supra, p. 62 . English Works of Sir Thomas More, edited by W. E. Campbell and A. W. Ree<3, London',' 1931, I: 332-335. 9P. of P., 11. 5348-5796. tongues.But time, in which takes place the course of his tory from Adam's fall to the redemption of Christ and the last Judgment, blots out his fame. Time is a formidable figure, covered with swallows' feathers, girt with a sword, carrying in one harkd fire and in the other an "horloge." More's Time as well carries a clock as his symbol. Finally comes eter nity, queen of heaven and ruler over souls after the last Judgment. Hawes unites with More in reminding the reader of the mutability of the world and the permanence of heaven and the soul. The idea of time being overcome by eternity is not original with More, of course. Thomas, in the Summa Contra 12 Gentiles tells about the new heaven and the new earth which is immutable and incorruptible and takes the place of time. 0 However, the sustained similarities between the two poems are too marked to overlook. They point to some sort, of interde pendence. More's poem was probably written first, but there is a great deal in Hawes' version that is not More's and this last suggests that Hawes had seen the tapestries. Another of More's poems begins with a condemnation of astrology and considers at length the popular problem of for tune. The writer emphasizes man's ephemeral nature, and 1°P. of P., 1. 5496. 1- LP. of P., 11. 5607-15, etc. 12IV: 97. ^English Works, op. cit., I: 338-344. Written prob ably 1503-4. It Is the "preface to The Book of Fortune.’ 1 258 shows how a knave may flourish and a knight be cast down, a beggar grow rich and rich man poor. Since Fortune has such power to bring the high low, wise men choose humility and poverty. This poem is in the spirit of later apologies for the mean and sure estate, written partly in imitation of Horace and following an Italian vogue. It is an urban poem and provides an early example of the ideas that Wyatt and his group were writing into sonnets and other lyric forms, twenty- five years later. The Fortune of The Example of Virtue is the same sort of traditional creature, with arbitrary and often malicious power, who enjoys changing the positions of men. She boasts that she can exalt a fool and cast down a brave and wise man, and that no one can succeed without her concurrence,^4 It is possible that Hawes was influenced by lore's poem or by a fashion that More, for one, was making articulate. However, Hawes does not touch upon the idea of the value of the mean estate, which the War of the Roses, and the subsequent necessity of the great renunciation had made a virtue. But the two poems were probably written in the same year, and in spite of the difference in the tone at some points, More's poem may have suggested to Hawes the idea of making Fortune one of the four sisters and putting her on a level with the old triumvirate, "hardynes,n nature, and sapi- 14E. of V., st. 131-138. 259 ence. Finally, in the next year, 1504-5, More translated the life and some of the letters and other works of Pico della Mirandola. Among the poems is one giving five rules to ob serve in the battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and another describing twelve weapons of the spiritual 15 battle.Both of these poems contain stanzas depicting, in sensuous and personal terms, the suffering of Christ on the cross. It offers His pain as an incentive to duty and His example as a guide to the good life. There does not seem to be any evidence of specific imitation of these poems in "The Conversion of Swearers,” but the similarity of tone, in these two points of sensuous vividness and the following of Christ as an example, indicate that if Pico’s poem did not influence Hawes, at least the two poems are expressions of the same diffused tendency. At least, Hawes and More had many ideas in common dur ing the years from 1503 to 1505, and it seems impossible that they should all be merely coincidence. Hawes may have known More well enough to be influenced by his personal experiences and to read his poems before they were published. It is a matter of regret that one does not know the. substance of More’s lectures on The City of Cod, for Hawes may have heard ■ * - 5Bnglish Works of Sir Thomas More, op. cit., I: 385 and 388. them and used the ideas in them# In general, then, Hawes uses many aspects of* the ideal or characteristic personality of the Renaissance for his he roes, especially for Grand Amour. He Is sometimes conscious ly reflecting current ideas in his characters. Again, his poetry shows the influence of definite experiences and spe cific expressions of the ideas of his contemporaries that seems to indicate more or less personal relationship^, for example, with Colet and More. PART IV - CONCLUSION Hawes lived just before a great many changes took place that altered the whole aspect of the world. America had been discovered, but the significance of the discovery and the In terest in exploration had not yet turned men's faces to the New World. Growth, especially of the wool industry, and the new policy of mercantilism were to release new ranks of the middle classes. England had not yet felt the full force of the nationalizing and unifying power of Henry's absolutism. In literature, lyric poetry, drama, and fiction were pre sently to become the prevailing means of expression. The uni versity of Oxford retained its scholastic educational system officially until after the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII, and Colet's plan for St. Paul's grammar school was not yet developed. The influences toward reformation were at work, but the Reformation had not come. Science and philo sophy had the materials and Impulse for thought independent of scholasticism and the Church, but they had not yet made full1 use of their emancipation. However, it is not probable that the men of the first decade of the XVIth Century felt that they were standing on the threshold of a New Age.' They could not see the events of their time, as we can, as foreshadowings of industrialism, 262 scientific progress, or the Reformation. For one thing, much of the medievalism of the XVth Century survived, in scholas tic doctrine, in popular theology, in conservative education, in inhred and unreal literary traditions. But on the other hand, these years had a glory of their own. They had the brilliance of Henry VII*s court with its group of scholars and Italian courtiers; the Christian and Platonic scholarship of Colet; the humanistic interests of More and a half dozen others in London who had the inspiration of the classical philosophy and Greek scholarship of Italy as well as a solid English education; active printing presses; several credit able writers besides Hawes, like Skelton and Barclay, Douglas and Dunbar, Colet and More, the writers of moralities and early interludes, Caxton and Berners. The past persisted with reassuring continuity, the present was full and promis ing, and neither the disturbing nor the glorious aspects of the future were yet clearly apparent. Hawes lived with a certain tranquility in the midst of this world which appears to us to have been in an unusual state of flux, but which certainly mu3t have seemed stable enough to most contemporary observers. He was tranquil for one reason because it was a time of peace in England, at home and abroad. The^, he had a court position and was apparently assured of a living and favor. Finally, he was by education conservative, and he had no rebellious intellectual bril- 263 liance that would lead him to disturbing revolutionary ways. Although his works show many ideas that are new rather than old, he never seems to intend to be radical or to advocate a real change. He is satisfied with what he considers to be the status quo; but already some humanists and reformatory ideas had taken root among English intellectuals, and Hawes absorbs and uses them, perhaps without liberal intention* Hawes lived in this time when the world of ideas in cluded the theology and philosophy, inseparable, both of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. He must have been touched by both, in Suffolk, in Oxford, and in London, and indeed his poetry shows the influence of the Renaissance as well as of the Middle Ages. At first the medieval or conservative aspect of Hawes1 poetry quite overshadows the humanistic and reformative. It has not been the problem of this study to.find specific sources for his medievalism. But it has been necessary to pay some attention to it in order to distinguish the old from the new. In general, he follows Thomasian philosophy and doctrine, as it was expressed, for example, by catechisms and popular theologians like Pecock, and by the scholasticism of education in the schools. This doctrine had had erased from it distinctions like the differences between Thomism and Sco- tism, realism and nominalism; and there remained only gross concepts, the general residue of popular scholasticism at the end of the XVth Century. For instance, there were the seven liberal arts. They provide the scheme of organization for early medieval ency clopedists and for the course of study for the universities, from their rise until the XVth Century. Hawes’ uses them as the basis for Amour’s education, and calls them, according to the old fashion, the handmaids of doctrine. He gets many of the details of the discussion from medieval traditions that perhaps had their roots in classical ideas, but had been con ventionalized by much handling in scholastic summaries and commentaries. The five points of rhetoric will illustrate. They appear as chapter heads for the Ad Herennium of the Ci ceronian apocrypha. But they continue to be used by medieval rhetoricians like Reisch, and Hawes probably got them from his school books and, as he says, from his master Lydgate. His psychology is almost completely medieval. Most of \ his ideas areultimately from Aristotle or another Greek sys- i tern, but they came through the Arabian Aristotelians, Thomas and subsequent schoolmen, thence into the system of Pecock, for example, and the catechism, and became familiar habits of thought and speech. To explain personality in The Pastime of Pleasure he uses the "humors" theory which has an honor able tradition from Empedocles to Ben Jonson and beyond. Then'he classifies man’s "faculties" into groups of five out ward and five inward wits, as Avicenna, Thomas, and Pecock had done before him. But his discussion of them is vague and inaccurate. Likewise, he alludes to the three kinds of souls that Aristotle makes the basis of his biological hierarchy and his human psychology. Of this as well there are discus sions in Thomas and his scholastic and ecclesiastic'follower^ and the idea was probably common property in Hawes’ time. Several times in The Pastime of Pleasure he uses the vener able phrases ’ ’nature naturynge” and ’ ’nature naturate," some times erroneously enough, but a few times in a way that al most convinces one that he understood them. The phrases have a background in Aristotelian ideas, but they were formulated during the Middle Ages and were familiar to scholasticism. Hawes’ allusions are in distinctly medieval settings, for ex ample, in discussions of astrology and the Virgin Birth. In the same way much of his ethics is old-fashioned. He gives the mean, which he calls ’ ’mesure,” a great deal of space in The Example of Virtue, and he means by it some sort of general idea of proportion. But he does not have the Aristotelian conception of its supreme importance as the guide for finding a criterion for virtuous conduct through intel lectual judgment. He is again following a diluted commentary The four forces of values described in The Example of Virtue, sapience, courage, nature, and fortune, have no def inite precedent. Hot Plato nor Picino, Aristotle nor Thomas nor Pecock names the list as Hawes does, but all have some- 266 thing to contribute. He adds fortune to PlatoTs three forces with their concomitant virtues, and like him keeps justice apart and outside the others. Pieino names the Platonic vir tues prudence, fortitude, and temperance, and adds justice, giving the cardinal virtues of scholasticism. Aristotle makes courage and temperance important, and discusses fortune and justice, but he does not make them the exclusive virtues. Hawes rearranges and selects from all of these. Prom one point of view, Hawes follows the Thomasian way of salvation, especially in The Example of Virtue but also in The Pastime of Pleasure. It is the way of Intellec- ual control and the subjugation of the world and the flesh and their temptations. The mind, the will, and the affec tions must be subjected to the same purpose. This purpose is the intellectual realization of God and is not attainable in this life. Youth achieves it after his death and experiences beatitude. It is Impossible to separate philosophy from theology in scholasticism. But a great many of the more strictly theological ideas from the Middle Ages also persist in Hawes. He uses the old mythology of the world, the flesh, and the devil, the seven sins and seven virtues, the seven saving graces, the seven works of mercy, and the four daughters of God, and treats them not only as ideal but as literal reali ties. The chief sins he attacks are the allurements of the world, the flesh, and the devil. These are comprehensive and should take in everything. But he singles out for special condemnation the sins of swearing and idleness or sloth. These are not the sins that would appear most important if one were realistic and were looking at the matter without be ing influenced by a rigid tradition and convention. In the same way, his doctrine is usually medieval. There is the idea of Christrs death as a sacrifice or restitution, and the doctrine of His taking vengeance against man for his evil- doing. The doctrine of free will Is partly medieval and partly reformative. Hawes shows plainly that he has a back ground in traditional popular religion as well as in the more obvious points of scholasticism. medieval literature that are associated in some way with re ligious or. philosophical thinking. He uses the machinery of the vision, the romance of chivalry and adventure, and to some extent, in t t The Conversion of Swearers,t f the homily. He uses morality characters in a romance quest, and romance characters in a scholastic setting. The medieval literary influence most important to us is his courtly love. Almost all of the formal love scenes between La Bell Pucel and Grand Amour, and between Clennes and Youth are couched In courtly love terms, and much of the time the love itself is only courtly love. Similarly, he is influenced by certain aspects of 268 A great deal of the scholastic material comes ulti mately from Aristotle. The principle of the mean, the five inward wits and the various kinds of souls, the virtues of wisdom, temperance, and courage are Aristotelian concepts shared by scholasticism and Hawes. There are, among the other virtues in The Example of Virtue and The Pastime of Pleasure, some that are strictly the product of scholastic theology and some that seem to be more characteristic of the the real than of the medieval Aristotle. There is a marked shift in emphasis in the two groups from one poem to the other. There are about fifteen theological virtues in The Example of Virtue, and five in The Pastime of Pleasure; con versely, there are four characteristically Aristotelian vir tues in The Example of Virtue and thirteen in The Pastime of Pleasure. This seems to show an unmistakable shifty in know ledge and inclination, toward Aristotle between the first and second poems. It need not mean that Hawes learned more about the new Aristotle. Most of the virtues are from the Nioho- machean Ethics, which had been available for two centuries in Latin translation and was probably well known from commen taries if not from the text. But it does show that Hawes had an increased interest in Aristotle, which may reflect a gen eral turn in his direction, whether in new or old transla tion. Goncern about the new Aristotle was slow in showing itself in England, but people must have had renewed Interest 269 in the available Aristotelian material before they eared to turn to the new translations and interpretations of the Re naissance. They were at least beginning to become aware of Aristotle in England, perhaps under the stimulus of Italian scholarship, and Hawes shared this new interest. The only place that Hawes may possibly be using the Aristotle of the Renaissance is In his discussion of rheto ric. Aristotle’s Poetics was not known during the Middle Ages, and was not generally available in Europe until 1498. However, Hawes seems to touch upon several characteristic ideas, such as the importance of the principle of selection and the elimination of irrelevant matter, of choosing a suit able length, of disposing the matter'into a beginning, mid dle, and end, and of the organic unity of the whole that can be comprehended by a single effort of the memory. It Is pos sible that Hawes may have learned something about the two chapters of the Poetics that contain these ideas, and that in his treatment of rhetoric at such length he is sharing the general Renaissance interest in it. As in the case of Aristotle, the knowledge of Plato comes from two directions, from the Church and Its patristic Platonism, and from the Plato revived by Italian humanists like Ficino and Pico. Hawes’ poetry seems to contain Pla tonism from both sources. His didacticism and vindication of poetry on moral 270 grounds are a distortion of the Platonic attitude. Plato condemned poetry in its usual manifestations on moral, intel lectual, and psychological grounds, and of these the Middle Ages chose to condemn it on the first. They also justified it on moral grounds; if the intent and accomplishment of the literature were for moral instruction it was accepted. One way to have both the beauty of plot, character, and decora tion, and the moral lesson was to put them into allegory, or to interpret them allegorically if the author’s intention had not been didactie. Hawes insists upon a moral meaning, and insists upon the allegorical method of being sure of it. He is being influenced by a medieval interpretation of Platonism that misses Plato but is based on him. Another of Hawes’ Platonic ideas probably came to him first through patristic writers. That is the idea of the two worlds, the duality but correspondence between heaven and earth. The idea appears in both poems in the form of an earthly garden which in The Example of Virtue has a prototype in heaven, and in The Pastime of Pleasure is itself given celestial qualities. The two worlds are partly Platonic, in sofar as they help to explain the doctrine of ideas back of realism, and partly Christian in the role a personal God plays, either as the mind that thinks the ideal world, or, more popularly, as a dweller in the ideal world. John’s dis cussion of the world made flesh in his gospel is one aspect 271 of this duality, and his vision of the Hew Jerusalem in Reve lation is the other. Origen and Augustine among the patri stic writers, used the two worlds, the ideal and the imper fect but aspiring copy, as an important part of their think ing. From the Fathers the idea became a part of early medie val doctrine on the theological side, for example, in An selm's realism. Here the idea is Augustinian and Platonic, and is connected with the conception of the Trinity. In a poem like the Pearl it is apocalyptic, and definitely in the tradition of the Hew Jerusalem. The patristic tradition con tinued through Aristotelian scholasticism, and Hawes probably got his ideas chiefly from this source. However, there is vividness and freshness about his two worlds, and they are so closely connected with the idea of love and beauty, which he seems to get from Renaissance Platonism, that it is possible that he knew something about the two worlds from more direct contact with Plato. This contact must have come through Eng lish humanists and probably took the form, not of direct textual knowledge, but of general ideas picked up more or less casually. Ficino and Pico were the chief exponents of Plato in the Renaissance in Italy, and More and Colet were their chief interpreters in England. More translated some of Pico's works as well as his biography, so there is a definite source in England for Pico's ideas at this time. The knowledge of 272 Plato according to Picino is more diffuse and less specific, but his writings were the chief means by which Platonism was known to England. Both More and Colet were interested more in the Christianity than in the Platonism of the Italians, but there is Platonic influence. Picino1s Platonism Is inaccurate and incomplete. He was most interested in the ideas about love and beauty, and these were known chiefly through his commentary of the Sym posium. Picino makes the distinction between the common and divine love very prominent, and says that true love must be spiritual, experienced through the eye, the ear, and the mind. Beauty is the splendor of the divine countenance or divine goodness, and the love of this beauty brings souls to heaven. The soul has to learn to love true beauty, through experience of more and more heavenly beauty. The stress on chastity, and the correlation of beauty with God and love with the way of salvation are characteristic of Picino*s doc trine. Like Picino, Hawes insists upon the importance of chastity, and in his allegory of the marriage of Youth or Virtue and Chastity in The Example of Virtue he makes it the condition of true love. Their love ultimately brings them to the vision of God, which is the residence of true beauty and the object of all endeavor. Youth progresses through love of earthly beauty to love of divine beauty or the love 273 of God, In the Christian way, and this love makes possible / the beatific vision. Here,in The Example of Virtue as in I Picino’s commentaries^the conception of love and beauty is correlated with the Christian experience of salvation, the love of God, and the experience.of knowing God. Likewise, chastity is made of first importance and identified with di vine love. In The Pastime of Pleasure love and beauty are not so definitely Christian. Pucel’s beauty is celestial and eter nal but not divine. Amour’s love is the inspiration of his good deeds and brings him to virtue and the good life, as - Picino says love will do, but It does not bring him to the divine vision. He loves her for her heavenly beauty, wisdom, and virtue, but he finds his satisfaction completely in her, not in any less localized beauty. This conception is less Christian and less Platonic than that In The Example of Vir tue because it puts more emphasis on the lady. It resembles the idealized sexual love of Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, the Renaissance modification of it under the influence of Ficino’s new contact with Plato. This influence made ideal virtue, wisdom, and beauty more important than mere physical beauty, and transmuted.physical desire, rather than justified it, as Petrarchanism.did. The love is directed toward these purely ideal qualities, but these are realized entirely in the lady. It is not necessary to go beyond her for ideal 274 satisfaction of love. This exaltation of sexual love became a characteristic attitude of the Renaissance. There was a code accompanying this love somewhat simi lar to the Petrarchan variety. Pico names twelve properties of a true lover, and it is noteworthy that Amour has most of them. The lover must love one only, as Amour does. He must be unhappy when he is not with his beloved; Amour pines and complains, in the language, it is true, of a courtly lover. He must adorn himself for his love; Amour does not seem to be sensible to this refinement, but he does educate himself to be worthy of her. He must suffer all dangers to be with his love, and suffer harm for her sake; most of The Pastime of Pleasure is an account of Amour in his struggle to come to to his love through dangers. He must be with her always in thought; Amour meditates upon his lady in absence and is in spired by the thought of her to persist in his endeavors toward the good life and in his battle against sin. He must love what pertains to her; Amour loves beauty, wisdom, and virtue, because they are her qualities. He must love to praise her and hear her praises, and he must believe all things excellent of her; Amour listens to the recitation of her virtues from various people along his journey and praises her himself to Council, and toward the end, when Disdain and 1English Works of Sir Thomas More, edited by W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed,' London, 1931, I: 389. 275 Strangeness and the many-headed enemies to love try to shake his faith in her, he refuses to think ill of her. He is to weep with his love for joy in her presence, and for sorrow at partingj Amour and Pucel weep together at their parting, af ter she has promised her love to him and has sent him on his way to prove himself. He is to languish ever; Amour lan guishes and plains of his love, hut he is usually living too active a life to be permanently oppressed. He is to serve without hope of reward or profit; Amour serves much unre warded, but of course ultimately his reward is a foregone conclusion. In general, Hawes makes his expression of Pla tonic love and beauty fall definitely into the current pat tern of expression. Hawes1 Platonism lies in several strata, patristic, medieval Christian, and Picinian. The first two came from his general experience with conservative theology. The last may have come to him directly from Italian Platonists, but more probably through English humanists. Some of Pico’s works were available in More's translations, and there are enough parallels to indicate that Hawes may have known More's poems and his studies of Pico. The writer has found no defi nite written source in England for Picinian Platonism, but Colet and other humanists*were familiar with Picino's ideas and probably had an influence not now tangible. Most of Co- let's interest in Picino's Platonism was in its Christian as- 276 pects, and these found expression in his commentaries on Paul. The religion in the two long poems, is for the most part conservative and traditional, but suggestions of reform ative thought are found in “The Conversion of Swearers.” Like Colet and Erasmus, Hawes makes a personal loyalty to Christ and the acceptance of Christ as the only example of conduct the mark of true Christianity. The Christian may ap peal directly to Christ as Christ appeals to him, and there is no mediator necessary. Love is more important in the re lations of man God than wisdom- Man is saved by accepting Christ’s love, manifested in His sacrifice, and it is enough for him to love Christ in return. Man’s will is free, except that he must accept the Grace offered by Ghrist for salva tion. Preaching is one of the best means of making known the will of God. All of these points are characteristic of the beliefs of Hawes, together with the humanistic reformers be fore the Reformation, and some of them, especially the im portance of the love and example of Christ, became touch stones of Protestantism. Prom several points of view, Grand Amour is an exem plar of the ideal character of the Renaissance. He chooses the active life of the world instead of the contemplative life, denying asceticism and the ivory tower. He prepares for a well-rounded life that offers physical, intellectual, erao- 277 tional, and practical satisfactions. He pursues beauty, and loves it in both its sensuous and its celestial aspects. He tries to realize the ideal of being learned, virtuous, civil, versatile and somewhat of a Platonie lover. In a word, the philosophy of the Renaissance gave Hawes some ideas associated with reformation, and suggestions of Platonism in his use of beauty and love, and these ideas probably came to him from the English humanists. The old and new are fused and confused in indiscriminate and incongruous mixture. Usually the general concepts are what show Renais sance touches, and the details are from old material, but oc casionally the reverse Is true. Often a living purpose or unifying idea will save much poorly assimilated conventional matter from being without meaning. Some of his material shows specific sources; but much of it seems,to suggest the vital but intangible and general influence that comes from personal contacts, ideas current in sermons and lectures, and in ephemeral and casual writing. It is not so much a literary or academic as a social influ ence. Hawes wrote better than he knew when he identified himself with, the hero in The Pastime of Pleasure. Like Grand Amour he stood at a finger post and had to choose between the old and the new. He chose the new, really, but his life was so full of the old and there was so much of it in his environ ment that he could not be consistent, even if he could have been able always to realize that he was faced with a choice, and if he had been able to discriminate. He has not superior intelligence, and much that he touches both of traditional and of Renaissance material he understands imperfectly. But he continues without disillusionment and discouragement to aspire to the ideal beauty, wisdom, and virtue that seem to him in the beginning to be good. BIBLIOGRAPHY 280 A. SOURCES Hawes, Stephen, The Conuerayon of Swerera. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509. HN 6ld09. It is imperfect, lacking the first leaf of this poem, and "The Joyful Meditation,” originally a part of this edi tion. , The Conuercyon of Swerers. London: Johan Butler, _ $j7~D# HN 61308. Complete and with only minor differences in readings from 1509 edition. ______Here followeth a corapendyous story/and it is called the example of vertu... London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530. HN 6l$27, The only edition here available. , The Pastime of Pleasure. Vol. 173. William E. Mead," editor, £!. El. T. S., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Reprint of 1517 edition, with variant readings from 1509, 1554, and 1555 editions. Alcock, John, Mona Perfectionis, otherwise in englysshe/the yle of perfeccon. London:" Wynkyn de Worde, 1496. Devotional book. Apocrypha and Pseudepigraph!a of the Old Testament in Eng- lish. (II: 799-834.) R. H. Charles, editor, 2 vols.; Ox ford" : Clarendon Press, 1913. Contains "Fragments of a Zadokite Work." Aristotle, Works. W. D. Ross, editor, 11 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931. Bale, John, Scri'ptorum Illustriis maioris Brytannie... Bas e leae',"" Apud 'Toahneri Oporinum, 1557-59. * First extant biography of Hawes. 281 Colet, John, Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. J. H. Lupton, editor, London:' Bell and Daldy, 1873. Text, with introduction on sources and contemporary his tory. ______, Letters to Radulph, on the Mosaic account of Crea- tio'n, together with other treatises. J. H. Lupton, edi tor and translator, London: Bell and Daldy, 1876. ________, Two Treatises on the Hierarchy of Dionysius. J. H. Lupton~s edi'tor, London: Bell and Daldy, 1869. The Earliest Arithmetics in England. Vol. 118. Robert Steele, editor, E. 'L. ^f. S., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922. Fifteenth Century translations of Alexander de Villa Dei and of Sacrobosco. Feylde, Thomas, Contraverye Betwyne a lover and a Iaye. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530 • Contains a reference to Hawes, deceased. Hilton, Walter, This is a devout boke... London: Julyan No tary, 1507. , Scola Perfectionls. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1494. Devotional books. Latimer, Hugh, Sermons. George Lewis Corrie, editor; Parker Society. Cambridge^University Press, 1894. Leach, A. P., Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909. Cam bridge: 1911, University Press The charter for Ipswich Grammar School is contained in it. Lydgate, John, Assembly of Gods. Vol. 96. A. L. Triggs, editor, E. E. T. S., London: Paul, Trench, and Trubner, 1896. More, Sli? Thomas, English Works of Sir Thomas More. W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed, editors, £ vols.; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New Yorkt Lincoln MacVeagh, 1931. 282 Contains More*s English poetry and his biography and translations of Pico. Pecock, Reginald, The Donet. Vol. 156. Elsie V. Hitchcock, editor, E. E. T. S., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. (1443-49) , The Folewer to the Donet. Vol. 164. Elsie V. HTfcchcock, editor, E. E. T.' s., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. (1453-54) _______ * The Reule "Plato, Works. Ben.1 amin Jowefct, editor, 5 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. ________, Platonis philosophi quae extant Greece ad editonem Henrici Stephani accurate expressa cum Marsilii Picini interpretatione... Vols.; 1 and 10. Zwiebrucken: Studiis Societatis Bipontinae, 1781. The Bipont edition of Plato with Greek text and Picino*s Latin translation. _____ , Works. Marsilio Picino, translator and editor; Florence, 1491. Latin text, with commentaries. The most important is that on the Convivium Public Records Office Documents: Calendar of the foine Rolls. Vol. 14. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1933. Calendar of the Inquisition and other Analogous Docu ments'. V'df. r. London': Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1898'. Calendar of Patent Rolls. London: Mackie and Co., Ltd., rm r.--------- These books provide references to members of the Hawes family. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, (in part). George Saint- bury, Loci Critic!^ Boston: Ginn and Co., 1903. Roper, William, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knighte, writ ten by William Roper, esquire, whiche maried Margaret, daughter of the sayed Thomas Moore. Vol. 197. Elsie V. Hitchcock, editor, E. E. T. S., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. 283 Suffolk, 1327, Subsidy returns# Preface by.S. H. A. S., London: Woodbridge, 1906# Suffolk, 1524. Preface by S. H. A. S., London: Woodbridge, rffa:----- These books provide references to the family. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles. The English Dominican Fathers, translators, London: Oates and Washburne, 1923. ________, Summa Theologica. The English Dominican Fathers, translators, London: Oates and Washburne, 1922. Thoresby, John, Lay Folks1 Catechism, and a Wycliffite adapta tion of the same'. Vol. 191, ''Ihomas Frederick Simmons, editor, E. e . T. S. London: Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1901. Wood, Anthony, Athenae Oxonienses, An exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the university of Oxford... Vol. 1. Philip Bliss, editor, London: T. Bensley, 1813. Second full biography of Hawes. B. SECONDARY WORKS Allen, P. S., Age of Erasmus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914. Combines biography with careful accounts of Erasmus1 ev- vironment, at school, at the university, in London, etc. Source for facts about times. Alline, Henri, Histoire du Texte de Platon. Bibliotheque de 1‘ecole des hautes etudes, #218. Paris: Edouard Champion, 1915. Begins with the first Academic editions and ends with the establishing of the definitive text, giving editions, condition of text, and main points in the history of critical opinion. Aristotle, Poetics. Ingram Bywater, editor, Oxford: Claren don Press, 1909• Greek text, and a valuable introduction oh the history of the Poetics. 284 ________, Poetics, D. S, Margolioth, editor, London: Hodden and Stoughton, 1911, Introduction contains an especially careful history of text and account of Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century MSS on which he bases his text. Berdan, John M., Studies in Tudor Literature: Early Tudor Poetry, 1485-1557. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Authoritative for narrative and criticism of period. Bigg, Charles, Christian Platonista of Alexandria. (1886) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. Deals with St. Clement, Origen, etc. Cambridge History of English Literature. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, editors, 14 vols., and index; Cambridge University Press, 1907-27. Carlisle, Nicholas, Concise Description of Endowed English Grammar Schools, in •^ngla'nd ana Wales. 2 vols.; 'London: Baldwin, Credoek, and Joy, 1818. Useful for historical accounts of Suffolk Grammar Schools. Copinger, H. B., Index_Nominum et Locorum... Materials for the history of Suffolk. 5 vols.; Manchester, 1907. Index of people and places of note in Suffolk. Hawes is merely mentioned as a native. Courthope, W. A.,History of English Poetry. London: Mac millan Co., 1897. Contains perfunctory description of The Pastime of Pleasure. Dargan, Edwin Charles, History of Preaching. 2 vols.; New York: Geo. H. Loran <2o., Hodden and “ Stoughton, 1905. Valuable accounts of preachers and the nature of their preaching. de Wulf, Maurice, History of Medieval Philosophy. 2 vols.; London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1926. Indispensable for general account of medieval philosophy. 285 Dictionary of National Biography* L. Stephen and S. Lee, editors, 22 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1908-09. Standard account of Hawes' life. Dodd, ^illiara, Courtly Love in Chaucer and Power. Boston: Ginn and Co., I9l3. One of the best studies of the tradition. Einstein, Lewis, Italian Renaissance in England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1902’. Scholarly account of the various sources of Italian in fluence, and the form it took in England* The chapters on the scholar and the courtier are especially impor tant. i The Encyclopedia Britannica. Hugh Chisholm, editor, 28 vols. _ a'rid index; New York: Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 1911. It has been useful for scores of minor facts and dates. Fisher, G. p.# History of the Christian Church. New York: Scribner's,1891. Useful for general conceptions. Protestant bias. Foster, Joseph, Alumni 0xonien3is, 1500-1714, Being the ma triculation register of fciie "University. 4 vols.; Ox ford: Parker and Co., 1891* Hawes is simply mentioned as ttgroom of the Bedchamber..” Gairdner, James, Lollardy and the Reformation in England. London: Macmillan, 1908. Stresses the reformative forces at work before the Re formation. Gasquet, A., Eve of the Reformation. London: Geo. Bell and Sons, 1905. Stresses the value of humanism and religious reform be fore Luther. Catholic bias. ^Gasquet Is a Catholic Ab bot. , Parish Life in Medieval England. London; Methuen, 3^ 6. ---------------------------------- 286 Valuable for sympathetic account of medieval popular religion. Groves, P. P., History of Education. Hew York: Macmillan Co., 1912. Useful for details about curriculum in medieval schools, and about the rise of humanism. Hammond, E. P., ifragliah Verse, between Chaucer and Surry. Durham, No. Carolina: Duke University, 162'?. Introductory account of sources and exerpts from text of The Pastime of Pleasure. Places the poem in rela tion to sources and in respect to the poetry surround ing it in time. Harpsfield, Nicholas, Life and Death of Sir Ahomas More. Vol. 186. Elsie V. Hitchcock, editor, U. E. tf. London: Humphrey Milford, 1932. Written in "the time of Queen Marie;" its greatest value is in the editor’s notes on the margin, giving dates and sources of each item. Harris, C. r. S.# Duns Scotus. 2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. A critical study of the text for authenticity, and a new attempt to determine the meaning of his works, especially in relation to Thomasian scholasticism, Augustine, Grosseteste, etc. Harrison, J. S., Platonism in English Poetry, XVI and XVII uentury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1915. Picino and Spenser are the center of his study. Hazlitt, W. C., Schools, School Books, and School Masters. London: Jarvls, 1888. Valuable data on texts both in schools and in universi ties in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Hoyland, John S., The Great Forerunner. London: Constable and Co., 1928. Parallels between Platonism and Christianity, but not approached strictly from an historical and critical point of view. 287 Dean Inge, xhe Philosophy of Plotinus. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923. Discusses the nature of mysticism, and the effect of Pla tonism and neo-Platonism on points of doctrine like the Trinity, the nature of the soul and immortality, and realism. Leach, ik. P., Schools of Medieval England. London: Methuen and Go . , 1915. Defense of sehools and the state of culture before the Reformation. Legouis, ^mile, and Cazamian, Louis, A History of English Literature. New York: Macmillan Co., 1929. Invaluable both for reference and for interpretation, in the whole field. Lupton, J. H., Life of JolnColet, D. P., London: Geo. Bell and wons, 1909* Definitive in biography and useful for information about contemporary life. Lydgate, John, Temple of Glass. Vol. 60. J. Schick, editor, E. E. t . S., London: Humphrey Milford, 1891. Introduction relates the poem to Hawes. Lyte, H. C. M., History of the University of Oxford, to 1530. London: Macmillan Co., XS&u “ Valuable for curriculum, history of events, and person alities at Oxford. Mallet, E. e ., History of the University of Oxford. London: Methuen and Co., 1924. The standard history of Oxford. It does not go so far afield, for instance in Italian humanism, as Lyte*s book does, and gives more intimate historical and bio graphical detail about the university. Mangan, John ffoseph, Life, Character, and Influence of De- siderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. New York: Macmillan, 1927• Disagrees with traditional interpretations at several points, especially where they stress Erasmusf early hu manism. 288 MeKeon, Richard, Selections from Medieval Philosophy. New York: Scribner*s Sons, 19307 Selections of texts and useful glossary of scholastic Latin vocabulary. Morgan, Caesar, An Investigation of the Trinity of Plato, and of Philo Judaeus. Cambridge: Lord John W. Parker, 18537" Written about 1795. Considers the relation of Platonism and Christianity on the matters of the Trinity and the Logos, with the conclusion that Plato did not influence Christian doctrine. Mullinger, James Bass, University of Cambridge. 2 Vols.; Cambridge: 1873, University Press. The Standard History of Cambridge. Supports the idea that Cambridge started the Reformation, Neilson, William Allen, Origins and Sources of the Court of Love. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1899. Relations to court of love, statutes of love, allegory, and the literary expressions of the idea. Oust, G. R., Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 1550- 1450. Cambridge: University Press, 1930. Reciprocal influence of allegory, anecdote, satire, etc., discussed, and illustrated in Piers Plowman. Pater, Walter, Renaissance. London: Macmillan, 1912. The chapter on Pico della Mirandola is especially use ful. Pollard, A. F., Wolsey. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1929. Pollard, A. W., and Redgrave, G. R., Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed In England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books printed abroad, 1475-1640. London: Bibliographical Society, 1926. Indispensible for finding contemporary publications, locating extant copies, getting bibliographical data, etc. 289 Potter, F. R., Sir Thomas More. LQndon: Parsons, 1925. Useful for biography, description of writings, and en vironmental background. Rashdall, Hastings, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1895. Standard study of medieval universities, to the Renaissance. Saintsbury, George, History of Criticism. 3 vols.; Londons and Edinburgh: Wi11iam Blackwood and ^ons, 1900. Comprehensive and standard, butmust be supplanted by actual texts. Salter, F. M., ttSkelton’s Speculum Principle,” Speculum, 9: 25-31 ?, January, 1934. Text, and discussion of Skelton’s relation to the royal household. Sandys, John E., Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learn ing. Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1965. The detailed study of humanists is valuable. Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church.’ 7 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892. Voluminous history with decided Protestant bias. Seebohm, Frederick, Eve of the Protestant Revolution. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924. The most valuable part is the discussion of the state of Christendom just before the Reformation. , Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869. An old and very Protestant account of the lives of these three men, especially in relation to the Reformation, now almost classic. Sheldon, H. C., History of the Christian Church. 5 vols.; New York: Crowell and Co., 1895. ' 290 Voluminous text book, Protestant bias. Smith, Preserved, The Age of the Reformation. New York; Holt and Co., 1920. Much stress on causes and concomitant conditions. Spingarn, Joel Elias, History of English Criticism in the Renaissance. New York: Macmillan Co., 1899. ! “" Both for detail and interpretation the book is still unequaled. Steele, Edward, Medieval Lore. London: Elliot Stock, 1893. Extracts, with references to book and chapter, from Bartho1omaeus• Taylor, A. E., Platonism and its Influence. London: Long mans, Green, and Co., 1832. Minimizes Aristotelian influence. Especially useful in the historical sketch up to Xlllth Century. Taylor, H. W., Medieval Mind. 2 vols.; London: Macmillan Co., 1927. Indispensible for the study of the Middle Ages. ________, Thought and Expression in the XVIth Century. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan and Co, 1920. Like The Medieval Mind in scope and excellence, with special stress on England. Temple, William, Plato and Christianity. London: Macmillan Co., 1916. Historical account, especially useful for the patristic period. Thorndike, Lynn, The History of Medieval Europe. Boston; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928. ' Text book convenient for reference, valuable to the beginning of the XVIth Cnetury, if one discounts the medieval bias. 291 Traill, H. E., Social England. 6 vols.; London: Cassells and Co., 1894. Invaluable, for any aspect of history. Each chapter by a specialist. Villari, Pasquale, Life and Time of Giralano Savonarola. 2 vols., London: T. Wisher Unwin 1898. Victoria History of the County of Suffolk. William Page, editor, London: Archibald Constable 6o., Ltd., 1907. Especially useful for history of grammar schools. Wakeman, H. 0., Introduction to the History of the Church of England. London: Rivingtons, 1927. Useful for detail, and applicable especially to England, both medieval and Renaissance. Walker, Williston, History of the Christian Church. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, l92£>. Text book from Protestant point of view. Warton, '^homas, History of Engi3LS:h Poetry. 4 vols.; London* Thomas Tegg, 1840. Interesting but not important from the point of view of modern scholarship. Weber, Alfred, and Perry, R. B., History of Philosophy. (1896) New York: Charles Scribner*s Sons, 1625. Convenient for general reference but not for detail. Wells, Whitney, ’ 'Stephen Hawes and the Court of Sapience,” Review of English Studies, 284-94, July, 1936. Contains a critical summary of opinion on sources, with special reference to Court of Sapience. Woodward, William Harrison, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance. 1400-1600, Cambridge: Univer sity Press, 1924. Valuable for scholarship and educational theories of early humanists. 292 Zeller, Eduard, Outlines of the History or Greek Philosophy. L. R. Palmer, translator, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1931. Indispensable in any consideration of Greek philosophy. APPENDIX 294 APPENDIX A. Bishop Bale, Scriptorvm Illustrium maioris Brytannie, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiara uocant: Cataloguo: a Iapheto pep 5618 annos, usque ad annu(m) hunc Domini 1557 ex Beroso, Gennadio, Beda, Honorio, Bostono feuriensi, Frumentario, Capgrauo, Bostio, Burello, Trissa, Tritemio, Gesnero, loanne Lelando, atqiie aliis authoribua colleotus, & IX Centurias eontinens....... Autope loanne Baleo, Sudouolgio Anglo, Ossopiensi apud Hy- bepnos iamppidem Episcopo, nunc apud Gepmanos ppo Chpisti ppofessione peregrino* •.. Basileae, Apud Ioannem Oporinum. Stephanus Havvew. LVIII (page 632) Stephanus Havues, illustpis generis homo, ab Ipsa adolescen- tia cupidus bonis studiis mentem excolendi, relictis paren- tum aedibus, ad diuepsas diuersapum pegionum scholas, pro literis hauriendis se contulit. Doctpinlam vero, quam stu- diopum tempore pep Angliam, Scotia(m) & Galliam, accurate perdidicit, in sermone, in moribus, & in omni uitae suae con- suetudine exprimebat. Ingenium ei foelleissimum contigit, & lingua ad omnem dieendi rationem accomoda ) totaq(ue) eius uita, ut fertur, quasi virtutis exemplum fuit. Vnde sapien- tisslmus princeps, Henricus septimus Anglorum rex, ad aulam, ad interiorem cameram, & ad secretum cubiculum tandem, sola uirtutis comraendatione uocabat. Vbi inter amoena contem- plationis ocia, in Anglico sermone composuit, Delectaraentum Spiritus. Lib I Amanfciura ^onsolamen. Lib I 295 Virtutis exemplar. Lib I De Coniugio principle. Lib I Alphabetarium auicularum. Lib I Tempum crystallinum. Lib I Aliaq(ue) nonnulla metro ac prosa congessit, quae a multis in Anglia cum uoluptate leguntur. Claruit anno a diuini verbi inearnatione 1500, sub Henrico praedicto. In quo Alexander pontifexub Iilaeum Romae, in maiori quam unquam antea lux- uria, celebrauit. TRANSLATION OP BALE'S BIOGRAPHY Stephen Hawes, man of illustrious family, from his own youth desirous of cultivating his mind with good studies, leaving the house of his parents behind, betook himself to various schools of different regions, for the sake of drink ing up letters. Truly the doctrine which he learned care fully during the period of his studies through England, Scot land, and Prance, he expressed, in speech, in habits, and in all the customs of his life. He attained a most happy tem perament, and by language was adapted to all reason of speak ing, and his life, so to speak, was almost an example of vir tue. Whence the most wise Prince Henry the VII of England called him to the court, to the inner room, and to the secret chamber, at length, with the single commendation of virtue. There, among pleasant places of contemplation he composed in the English language, 296 The Delight of the Soul Consolation of Lovers* Example of Virtue* The Marriage of the Prince. The Alphabet of Old Wives ihe Temple of Glass And several - ,..others he composed in pros© and in verse which are read with pleasure by many in England. H© shone in the year 1500 of the incarnation of the divine word, under Henry the prophesied.*... 297 APPENDIX B. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses. An exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the university of Oxford, to which have been added the fasti or annals of the said university. By An thony a Wood, M. A., of Merton College. CEdited by Philip Bliss, fellow St. JohnTs College London,] T. Bensley, Printer. 1813. I: 10-11. Stephen Hawes, or Hawys, originally descended, as it seems, from the Hawes, of Hawes in the Bushes, in the county of Suffolk; was instructed in all such literature as this university could at that time afford, but whether he took a degree, we have no register to shew it. Afterwards, in his travels through England, Scotland, and France, visiting the receptacles of good letters, did much advance the foundation of literature that he laid in this place; so that after his return, he being esteemed a complete gentleman, a master of several languages, especially of the French, and above all, for his most excellent vein in poetry, he was received into the court of king Henry 7; who being a great encourager of learning, and a judicious understander of men was by him made at length one of the grooms of his chamber, and highly esteemed by him for his facetious discourse, and prodigious memory; which last did evidently appear In this, that he could repeat by heart most of our English poets; especially Jo. Lydgate, a monk of Bury, whom he made equal, in some respects, with. Geff. Chaucer. He hath transmitted to pos terity several books in English, some of which are in verse and some in prose, as 1. Pastime of Pleasure or the history of Graund Amour and Labell PuGele, containing the knowledge of the seven sciences, and the course of man’s life in this world. 2. The Exemplar of Virtue 3. Delight of the Soul 4. Consolation of lovers. 5. Crystalline Temple, etc. one or more of which was written in Latin. Much valued in the latter end of Henry 7 reign, but when he died I know not

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