From the ‘Times Literary Supplement’, 20 June, 1929, pp. 481–2; an unsigned review to mark the 400th anniversary of Skelton's death.
Blunden (1896–1974) was an English poet and man of letters.
Charles Lamb's thesis on the sociable nature of antiquity rises in the memory on the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of ‘Master Skelton, Poet Laureate,’ a being so little destroyed in his individuality by the passage of this long period as to commend exactly the sweet reasonableness of the words, ‘Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning.’ Scarcely less than Chaucer, Skelton habitually sets forth like a cheerful sunrise and a jolly workman; there is sunshine and there is action in his ancient and modern verse. Speaking across so wide a range of time, society, science and creed, the tutor of Henry VIII and the too candid friend of Wolsey has power to bring us to our windows with all the freshness of a known and sudden voice. What has age to do with Skelton?
[Quotes ‘Garland of Laurel’, lines 1004–22.]
Nothing could be more instantaneous, though in our date we have not quite the same inbred notion of the nobility of falcons.
This song of Skelton's, springing out from the fifteenth century into the twentieth, will not be refused as a realisation of poetical ubiquity, nor do I quote an unfamiliar poem. But we must proceed to the admission that, in spite of his carolling intimacy, Skelton suffers considerably from the malady of being registered among the ‘old authors.’ Between posterity and antiquity there is always a distorting mist. There are faults on both sides. In the instance of Skelton, the faults of posterity have been more than usually stubborn and unkind. The character of the man, which must always imply for the majority the worth of the poet, has been scribbled upon with an indolent vaingloriousness. Had he been living in the eighteenth century, he would have been estimated in the same vein of cordiality as were Arbuthnot and Gay. In the nineteenth there would have been little to withhold from him a name of breezy honesty and eccentric virtue, akin to that of Edward FitzGerald. In the twentieth, one may picture him in the sphere of Mr. Chesterton, or Mr. Shaw. But being demonstrably an ‘old author’ he fell under the careless lash of Pope (himself not the most infallibly offenceless of wits), and was put in his place:
Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote.
Fifty years later came Thomas Warton, from whom a critical and personal good-fellowship might have been anticipated towards a predecessor whom he was professing to have read; but what had Warton to say? ‘It is vain to apologise for the coarseness, obscenity, and scurrility of Skelton, by saying that his poetry is tinctured with the manners of his age. Skelton would have been a writer without decorum at any period.’ Epithets like these of Pope and Warton, fostered by negligent reading, have overgrown the simple honour of Skelton the original. While most of us shrink from active elucidation of the works, we apprehend that they are not as ingenuous as they might be. Our minds have been obscurely assured that Skelton was guilty of producing ‘The Tunning of Elinor Rumming.’
And indeed it is one of his considerable works. Even Dyce, who stood up so valiantly in defence of Skelton, glances at its darker reputation with uncertainty: ‘If few compositions of the kind have more coarseness or extravagance, there are few which have greater animation or a richer humour.’ Strong and bitter are its ingredients. It is rhyming Rowlandson. But I mistake greatly if it is not as a whole a sharp medicine, and no concoction for the perverted taste of the insolent. Elinor Rumming is a witch, her alehouse a den, and the poor slatterns who are fascinated into it are as the victims of Circe. It is not Skelton's fault that his startling talent for sketching human peculiarity makes the poem incidentally a mirror of low life, nor that his genial preferences come in to vary his pitiless facsimiles with milder humour. His object was to show what intemperance can do with the female sex; to present the contrast between his merry Margarets and his Margery Milkducks; even (for he was the parson as well as the laureate) to show some of his congregation, in a more penetrative form than sermons, the ruinous costliness of the tavern:
[Quotes ‘Elynor Rumming’, lines 600–6.]
Let us accord to Skelton the credit given in ordinary to an author, and consult his own Latin postscript to ‘The Tunning of Elinor Rumming’ for his stated intention in the satire. ‘The poet,’ he declares, ‘invites all women, who are either too fond of the bottle, or are notorious for their sluttishness, or their disgraceful indecencies, or their gossip and clack, to pay attention to this little book.’
Skelton was capable of furious and relentless onslaughts on those who challenged him. Once roused, he became a human battery of hoarse and hasty invective, hurling out expressions of contempt by the dozen, serious and comic mixed, against ‘false stinking serpents,’ ‘Moorish manticors,’ ‘mockish marmosets.’ In that there is nothing vicious. Rude railing has been practised by later poets, even Byron and Swinburne, and they are appreciated. In brief, I may express the conviction that ‘beastly Skelton’ never mounted the pulpit at Diss, never set Latin exercises to a Royal pupil; though, at the same time, we may be grateful for one or two of the nonsensical remarks made against our poet on the assumption of his beastliness. So the dear authoress of the ‘Lives of the Queens of England’ gathered her forces for a crushing comment: ‘It is affirmed that Skelton had been tutor to Henry VII. in some department of his education. How probable it is that the corruption imparted by this ribald and ill-living wretch laid the foundation for his Royal pupil's grossest crimes!’ The final reply to Pope and Warton and Agnes Strickland, and our own inherited legend, is the collected poetry of Skelton, whether we consider what has chiefly produced the misunderstanding — his satire against drunken women — or his fine, wise and humane allegory ‘Magnificence,’ or those songs of April and innocence which seem so like this year's, or that deep-toned direct utterance of the Crucifixion:
[Quotes ‘Wofully Araid’, lines 1–6.]
Thus far of the false barrier between us and the manly truth of Skelton; I come now to the other conditions which have troubled the understanding between this poet and ourselves. Pope, with another purpose, indicates them:
Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old;
It is the rust we value, not the gold. (1)
Yet, though the passion for the antique may preserve some precious relics of old glory, its process is often only a disguised limitation. Posterity, which is a very busy and breathless monster, naturally stands aloof from matter which it fears to be nearly unintelligible. The scholar is left to work out the assumed abracadabra of discarded speech, orthography, interest and allusion. At first sight, most of the pages of Dyce's Skelton appear too cryptic to come within the scope of our common reading and our leisure for it; and Dyce himself only ventured to offer his two volumes to ‘a very limited class of readers.’ Two poets of the younger school, Mr. Robert Graves and Mr. Richard Hughes, have particularly endeavoured to clear the air and show Skelton as a living and communicative poet; for my part I may observe that a great deal of his writings is as natural in style and as clear in significance as could be wished. The medieval spelling which indeed veils the outlines or varnishes the hues of his poetry can with a little labour be made no veil at all; one may think Skelton into modern English, for long passages together, with no more strain than that of transliterating ‘braynsycke frantycke folys’ into ‘brainsick frantic fools.’ In my present quotations I have done as much, taking what perhaps the canon of scholarship may censure generally as permissible here at least, because the effect of Skelton's presence is felt on ripened acquaintance without much accidental interruption: obsolete formalities do not belong to him; he lives in an essential approach-ableness. One must see him, if at all, as a friend of poetry and humanity and not as a perplexing fragment in a curiosity shop.
Among the British poets Skelton is remarkable for his metrical, as for his emotional, independence; his restless and whimsical nature expresses itself in a volleying succession of rapid rhythms, made more brilliant by the fund of alliteration, assonance and unexpected rhyme which he flings forth. But in his appearance of abandon there is an art concealed. His free verse is not what Warton superficially calls it, ‘this anomalous and motley mode of versification.’ It is founded on a decisive feeling for accent, and those ‘strong and fastened’ syllables which will carry a play of less obvious ones through a long composition. It is the literary employment of the popular song-metre, which requires always a colloquial indifference, though that is controlled by mood and intention. Swinging, dancing, dodging; laughing, clowning measures are instinctive with Skelton. Thus he seems to carry on a perpetual campaign against the philosophical and cloistered iambic, which has obtained so overwhelming a position in the verse-history of our poets. He cannot or he will not tread in its ordered placidity. He may sometimes attempt it, but is soon springing round its track with incorrigible variations. The secret of this is perhaps discoverable in his own words:
[Quotes from ‘A Replycacion …’, lines 365–78.]
The classic observation of Dr. Harvey as he laid down his Virgil may more readily be applied to Skelton; he has a demon, and only a few other writers (such as the poet of ‘Hudibras,’ or of ‘Don Juan’) give the same impression of audacity and urgency. The vigour of syncopation did not begin with our day; Skelton takes the lead:
[Quotes ‘Magnificence’, lines 1039–54.]
Under such a merry-andrew fusillade, to be sure, the poet is not the only one to grow dizzy; and the defect of Skelton is his superfluity of noise and phrase. But while we admit the monotony into which his voluble ecstasies lead us, we must allow that his spirit and his metre do yield graver and sweeter melodies. After the fun of the Skeltonian fair comes another voice, and none has exceeded its mild purity:
[Quotes ‘Garland of Laurel’, lines 985–92.]
Or the laconic lines will assume a dignity in which the impossible seems about to happen, and Skelton for a moment, turned Solomon, dreams of the sublime:
[Quotes ‘Upon a Deedmans Hed’, lines 7–11.]
For the young poet, wondering at the mystery of words and attempting the instrument of English verse, in such a season of discovery as that which sent Keats delighted through Chapman's Homer, the works of Skelton might be no unlucky recommendation. A mind naturally safe from excess of imitative enthusiasm could only win resource and comprehension from the diction and music of Skelton's poetical festivity. In the singular poem called the ‘Garland of Laurel,’ where occur the faultless lyrics in praise of Margaret Hussey and Isabel Pennell and other ladies, the technique of the poet is perhaps most versatile and impressive. The ‘Garland of Laurel,’ again, is acceptable to the general friend of Skelton because it displays him with harmless vanity — indeed, with that pride which belongs to health and hopefulness — warming both hands before the fire of his poetic life, and sketching his own various bibliography with affection. Paler light invests our later considerations of poetry as a profession. We have grown timid as writers and as readers. Both as writer and as reader of his own verse, John Skelton was radiant with contentment. He blessed his stars that he was a poet, and that he was a good one.
Of one of his major performances, and some of his shorter yet not less notable achievements, I have already taken notice. In commemorating Skelton four hundred years after his death, it is just to review his principal poems, so far as they are known to us; and actually, in spite of his volubility, the total extent of his surviving verse need not deter anyone from knowing him better. His closing years were themselves a proof of the influence of his poetry; they were passed in sanctuary at Westminster, away from the indignation of Wolsey, who had ‘read the book with interest.’ Skelton opened fire on this prodigious grandee in his ‘Colin Clout,’ which begins with a pleasing pretence of the futility of proceeding, since
The devil, they say, is dead,
The devil is dead. [lines 36–7]
Yet, Skelton proceeds, the devil is not dead. He is in the the Church. Then follows a great catalogue of his misdoings, each one stated in short, sharp definition. The sensual profits which he is making are reckoned; the luxuries of his new mansions are imagined with lively irony. These denunciations are at length concentrated unmistakably,
For one man to rule a king! [line 991]
Throughout the whole work Skelton combines solidity of sense, earnestness of heart and courage of opinion; moreover, the turns of the satire are dramatically forcible, and the argument is maintained as though by a bioscope of actual incidents and persons: ‘look on this picture — and on this!’
In ‘Speak, Parrot’ the invective against Wolsey is fearlessly increased; although, had we nothing more of the poem than the delicate, gay and ingenious overture, we might be content. Here is the parrot once and for all among the birds of the British poets, sparkling with rogue vitality
[Quotes lines 17–23.]
But Skelton's main object is not to vie in verse with Edward Lear's paintings of parrots. ‘Ware the cat, Parrot, ware the false cat!’ Wonderfully does the poet manipulate his invention. The parrot is put forward with his little wanton eye — but there are certain things he is pre-eminently able to detect. He also earns several presents of dates by describing those things with masterly anger. They are the characteristics of one who
carryeth a king in his sleeve, if all the world fail;
[line 423]
whose
Wolves' head, wan, blue as lead, gapeth over the crown.
[line 428]
‘Why Come Ye Not to Court?’ is the further exposure of Wolsey. The tone is curt and final. These, says Skelton, are the facts; and what will England do to counter them?
[Quotes lines 289–96.]
There could hardly be a more dangerous and momentous calmness than that which Skelton affects by way of a change in his appeal to the people — the ‘simple Hodge’ manner:
[Quotes lines 398–406.]
It was no idle fancy in ‘Colin Clout’ that the author, as he wandered through the streets, had the knack of hearing what people said. Skelton is rich in the tune and term of shop door, ale bench, market-place; quaintly learned and of a wide-roaming fancy, he brings his subject home with the sudden directness of language immediately conceived in necessities. If in this part of his poetic method he draws upon the harsher weapons of the vulgar tongue, I hold that his natural brightness of character remains unsullied; his ‘anger has a privilege’; and so, in his last condemnation of Wolsey, the occasional brutality is to be regarded as marking his complete belief in the mission of his satire. The marvel is that he escaped; had he been what he has been counted, a mere buffoon, there would have been no marvel; but Skelton wrote with an inspired persecution, comparable with the voice that cried in the wilderness.
Two admirable productions of Skelton's on the large plan remain for my annotation. ‘Philip Sparrow,’ which Coleridge (who never confused ancient date with vanished value) found ‘exquisite and original,’ is his prettiest work. It combines a dirge for a pet bird with a song in honour of the bird's owner; and, although Catullus had shown what beautiful caprice could be expressed on such an occasion, it might not have been thought that a new poet would so enrich and illumine and berhyme the matter as Skelton does. Orthodoxy might demur at his parody of the service book, which nevertheless demanded genius, of humour as of metre:
De pro fun dis cla ma vi
When I saw my sparrow die.lines 145–6]
All that is noticed of the sparrow is touched with a choice Lilliputian lightness, and with a mythological play that here and there adventures into the higher air of romance. The funeral congregation of birds, too, though doubtless of an heraldic rather than ornithological circumstance, is a profusion of ‘sounds and sweet airs.’ And at last when the poet turns from the lament for Philip while the sun with sympathetic leave-taking sinks westward, then he surprises us after his many inventions by discovering a strong and happy impulse, culminating in the song to her who
Flourisheth new and new
In beauty and virtue:
Hac claritate gemina
O gloriosa femina.[lines 896–99]
Gems and blossoms, which he chooses in order to express this lady's grace, might be the images of his own style in a singing so matins-like.
The interlude ‘Magnificence’ is Skelton's most serious imaginative design. In this play the characters are abstractions, as Felicity, Liberty, Measure, Counterfeit Countenance, Crafty Conveyance; but there is no thin abstract monotony in their dialogues or speeches. The campaign of integrity and decency against licence and sharp practice is fought out with freedom of incident and keenness of stroke; excellent fooling makes the didactic and moralising passages more agreeable. The pleasure of Skelton's shrewdness, and of his mastery of aphorism, proverb and the wit of the crowd, is deepened by his apparently invincible skill in rhyme, with which he points and quickens the dialogues as though our ordinary talk ran that way:
[Quotes lines 1152–7.]
Such byplay contributes to the ultimate sobering of magnificence with ‘sad circumspection,’ and the whole may make us grieve that the interlude ascribed to Skelton by Warton, on a Necromancer, has either disappeared, or as some sceptical observers of Warton declare (as though avenging Skelton for the view of him in the ‘History of English Poetry’) never existed.
Skelton at all events existed. No necromancy placed him there between Chaucer and Marlowe, an erratic luminary darting his fireworks, in defiance of all other poetic rays and splendours, as the whim struck,
From Ocean the great sea
Unto the Isles of Orcady,
From Tilbury ferry
To the plain of Salisbury. [‘Philip Sparrow’, lines 318–21]
He has been regarded as a decidedly unheavenly body. Among folks of this world, however, I take him to have been a genuine worthy and entirely a man to have on one's side — an anticipation, in some measure, both of the temper and the talents of Swift. There was in him, however, a greener leaf than that great nature could put forth. When these and other attempts at an estimate of Skelton have been made, one thing remains certain: it is long enough since the item, ‘of Mr. Skelton for viii. tapers o1. 2s. 8d.’ was entered in the churchwarden's accounts of St. Margaret's Westminster, but still we find a pathos in the substitution of those dim lights at last for the sunlight so heartily enjoyed and glorified by the laurelled Skelton.
1 Pope, ‘Imitations of Horace’, Epistle II, i, 35–6.