The Introduction to Hughes's edition of ‘Poems by John Skelton’ (London, 1924), pp. ix–xv. One footnote has been deleted.
Hughes (1900–76) achieved his greatest recognition as the author of such novels as ‘A High Wind in Jamaica’ and ‘Fox in the Attic’.
It happens from time to time that some poet almost forgotten suddenly comes into his own. There is nothing strange and freakish about this: and it does not really give us license to crow over our fathers. The colour of the reading mind changes from one generation to another, as it changes from man to man: in becoming able to appreciate something our fathers found incomprehensible, or unpleasant, we generally lose our appreciation of something they found estimable. The ground shifts under us.
Certain poets have to wait a long time for the advent of a sympathetic generation: Skelton has had to wait four hundred years. Yet, you might say, in his own day his reputation was international: Oxford, Cambridge, and Louvain crowned him with laurel: he was tutor to Henry VIII and Orator Regius: Erasmus, Caxton, and other smaller fry praised him whole heartedly: and he was a sufficiently popular figure for a whole cycle of myth to have accumulated about his personality. But the learned admired him for his learning, and the people admired him as one of the most amusing and boisterous writers of any century: Skelton, knowing himself to be not only a scholar and a jocular but a poet, looked to Posterity for nice appreciation. The quality of poetry in Skelton was one of which it was impossibility absolute, in the rudimentary state of criticism and aesthetic theory, for the age of Henry VIII to have any inkling. (That they called him a poet, being deceived into a true verdict by irrelevancies, is nothing.) And so he placed his faith in Posterity: and Posterity has played the jade with him: never quite giving him his congé, she has kept him dangling after her through century after century — has been to him a sort of everlasting Fannie Brawne.
The reason for this neglect is simple and superficial. In the first place, he wrote at a time when the pronunciation of English was on the eve of a drastic change, and the dropping of the final e in so many words soon rendered his rhythms unintelligible. In the second, he came close before one of the greatest revolutions that ever transformed the surface of literature — the Elizabethan Era. Precurring signs of that revolution were already in the air: and he set his face against them. It is easy for us now, prejudiced by a knowledge of what was to come, to blame him: it is easy to explain after the race why such and such a horse won. But it would have been impossible to guess, at that time, from the stilted Italianate compositions of the opposite camp that the unaccountable Spirit of the Lord would choose such dry bones for its dwelling. Judged by themselves, they were worthless, and Skelton was right in condemning them. But he backed a loser: and has paid for his misfortune with four centuries of neglect and incomprehension.
For four centuries he has lain in his grave, food for the grammarians.
Largely, they are to blame. If the critic is a man who has failed at one of the arts, the scholar is generally a man who has failed at criticism. He looks for no aesthetic worth in his subject-matter: for his purposes it is irrelevant, hardly even an encumbrance.* If he made this position clear, one would not blame him, one would not ask blood from a stone. But he does not; he pretends to criticism for form's sake: he accepts ready-made the judgment of the general, damning with one hand what he edits with the other: he takes his judgment from the general, while the general imagine that they are taking their judgment from him. They respect him: he has read all these unheard-of people, he knows: if there was any good in them, he would announce it. But he does not announce it, because he could not see it, even if it were shown him. God help any poet who hopes to be rescued from oblivion by the scholars! His only hope is to be set some day before a sympathetic generation in some form unencumbered by excess of learning, that his readers may discover him for themselves. Even then, not till the very servant-girls devour him by candle-light will it occur to his editors that the subject of their life's work had any intrinsic value of its own.
Their treatment of Skelton has been particularly scurvy. Only one, the Rev. Alexander Dyce, has taken him at all seriously. Such editions as appeared before the time of Dyce were almost unintelligible conglomerations of naively-accepted miscopyings. Dyce undertook the great and necessary work of putting the text into an intelligible form: and gave half his life to it. Dyce's edition is a fine piece of scholarship, and the standard text on which all future work must be based. But it is doubtful whether even Dyce realised the full aesthetic value of Skelton's poetry. As for the others, they deserve all opprobrium. The writers of literary histories have been content to repeat with parrot-like persistence, one after the other, that Skelton was a witty but coarse satirist, having occasionally a certain rude charm, but in the main bungling, disgusting, prolix, and tedious: and they have
* One gentleman, to whom the Editor was told to apply for information, answered that his interest in Skelton lay in the possibility of reconstructing the Church of Diss from the description of it in ‘Ware the Hauke’. That was at any rate frank: the literary historians are not. See the ‘D.N.B.’, etc.
relegated him to that most damning of insignificancies, the part of an ‘influence.’ They have been content to leave Dyce's edition, published eighty years ago, not only unrevised, but out of print and now practically unobtainable. But, truly, Skelton is a poor satirist compared with his powers as a poet: his influence is negligible when compared with the value of his original work: and simply regarded as a rhythmical technician he is one of the most accomplished the language has ever known. There is more variety of rhythm in Skelton than in almost any other writer.
Take, for example, the first piece published in this book, ‘Speke, Parot’.* They regard it as an unintelligible piece of political satire, interesting only for its references to Wolsey and the Introduction of Greek! Those last three stanzas, which set the pointer to the parable, which tell us that
Parot is my owne dere harte…[line 213]
- they are entirely overlooked. Yet no one who bears those those three stanzas in mind can misread the rest, can fail to see the beauty of the whole conception. Shakespeare did not misread it: as his ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ bears witness.
So much for the core of the poem. But alas!
Crescent in immensum me vivo Psittacus iste: [line 513]
[That Parrot will grow to a boundless extent while I am alive]
Skelton, finding the Parot so convenient a mouthpiece for his views on things in general, has later hidden the sensitive mystery of his poem under a great deal of additional matter that is simply concerned with mundane affairs. (For it is generally admitted that the poem, as
* The sole reference to this poem in the ‘Dictonary of National Biography’ is to say that it is ‘written in Chaucer's well-known stanza’: which is not only inadequate, but also untrue. The rhyme-scheme is certainly that of Rhyme-royal: but the metre had never been used before; and so far as I am aware, has only once been used since — in ‘Rocky Acres’, by Robert Graves. I know of no other poem with more originality, more beauty, more subtle variety of rhythm than this same ‘Speke, Parot’.
But if I were to continue quoting the stupidities uttered about Skelton in high places, there would never be an end.
it has reached us, is a hodge-podge composed at many different dates.) Admittedly it is a difficult poem: but the extraordinary sense of rhythm, the extraordinary intellectual grasp that not only makes every word significant but every juxtaposition of words, every possible turn and shade of meaning, render it one of those few poems that can be read with increasing admiration, increasing comprehension and delight year after year. The more one reads it, the more one learns of its meaning, the more certain one is of never getting to the bottom of it. It is a living thing, its roots branching innumerably: comprehension of it is interminable. And, as all fine poetry must, it baffles eulogy.
Far simpler, far more easily popular, is the ‘Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe’. Here is no high lyrical mystery; only, in the words of Coleridge, ‘A beautiful and romantic poem’: very simple and pathetic. Jane Scroupe, a school-girl of Carowe, mourns for her dead pet. It is remarkable that at a time when Elizabethan drama was still below the horizon Skelton should have so characterised the poem, have brought Jane so vividly into our minds, not by description but by the very words she speaks. In two things the mediaeval poets excelled, even the dullest of them — in the description of birds and young girls: Skelton, if in the senses he is the first of the Georgians, in another is the last of the mediaevals: he has brought these two things to a climax in ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’
[Quotes lines 115–26.]
It is a pretty thing.
Next, one is faced with
The topsy-turvy tunnyng
Of Mistress Elynour Rummyng.
The weak stomach will be turned by it: but those with a gizzard for strong meat will find it a remarkable piece. I do not speak of it as a precursor of the ‘realistic’ school of poetry: it is more valuable than that. It is the processional manipulation of vivid impressions, the orchestration, the mental rhythm which strikes me. So far from calling it a realistic poem, I would call it one of the few really abstract poems in the language. Its aesthetic effect is that of a good cubist picture (or any picture dependent on form for its value).
It would be foolish to take each of his poems in turn: but one word should be said for the ‘Garlande of Laurell’. ‘This,’ say the historians, ‘is the longest poem ever written by a poet in his own honour.’ They accuse the author of pomposity and vanity in consequence. I only ask you to read it: I do not think he makes any claims in it which are not justified: after all, he is the finest poet in England (Scotland is hors concours) between Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and he cannot be blamed for knowing it. If he errs, it is in attaching too much reverence to Gower and Lydgate, not to himself. Anyhow, the whole is very pleasant reading: and some of the incidental lyrics are wholly delightful.
What wonderful plays, one thinks after reading ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’, he might have written: what easy characterisation! That he did write plays is known: and one, ‘Magnyfycence’, has survived. The others, like a great many of his poems, have unhappily vanished. The nineteenth century dubbed it ‘the dullest play in any language.’ From the point of view of the nineteenth century the judgment was admissible, seeing the ideal of drama it serves was not then invented: but not from the point of view of the twentieth. It is an abstract play, a sort of morality — still, even at the date I write, a little ahead of the times: but I believe that if the language were modernised and the whole produced with skilful expressionistic lighting it could not fail to create a sensation. Not in England, perhaps, for another twenty years or so: but I confidently recommend it to the notice of Berlin and Prague — and perhaps New York….