From C. S. Lewis, ‘English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama’ (Oxford, 1954), pp. 133–43.
Lewis (1898–1963) was a distinguished novelist, theological writer and literary critic. The following extract is from his volume contributed to the Oxford History of English Literature. Occasional footnotes have been deleted.
But when all's said John Skelton (1464?–1529) is the only poet of that age who is still read for pleasure. Skelton was a translator, a laureate of more than one university, tutor to Henry VIII, the satirist and later the client of Wolsey, and a jest-book hero in Elizabethan tradition. Pope's epithet of ‘beastly’ is warranted by nothing that ought either to attract or repel an adult; Skelton is neither more nor less coarse than dozens of our older comic writers. His humanism is a little more important than his supposed beastliness, but it did not amount to much. It led him to translate ‘Tully's Familiars’ and (from Poggio's Latin version) Diodorus Siculus, at some date before 1490. These translations, which still remain in manuscript, are said to abound in neologisms, often successful, and it is plain from such scraps of Skelton's prose as are accessible in print that he was a lover of ink-horn terms. But his humanism extended only to Latin and he was one of those who opposed the study of Greek at the university and called themselves ‘Trojans’. One of his objections to Greek learning is of great historical interest. He complains that those who learn Greek cannot use it in conversation, cannot say in Greek
How hosteler fetche my hors a botell of hay.
(‘Speeke Parot’, 152.)
This shows that the very conception of a dead language, so familiar to us, was to Skelton a ridiculous novelty. The process of classicization which was finally to kill Latin seemed to him merely the improvement of a living tongue.
If the list of his own works which Skelton gives in the ‘Garland of Laurel’ is accurate he must have been one of our most prolific authors, and his lost books must have outweighed in volume those which have survived; indeed his ‘Of Man's Life the Peregrination’, if it was really a version and a complete version of Deguileville's ‘Pèlerinage’, would have done so by itself. But it is hard to believe that so busy and erratic a genius ever completed such a task. In what follows I must naturally base my judgement on the extant works; but it should be remembered that we know Skelton only in part and the part we do know is by no means homogeneous. We cannot be sure that the recovery of the lost works might not seriously modify our idea of him.
In his earliest surviving pieces Skelton appears as a typical poet of the late Middle Ages: a poet no better than Barclay and, in my judgement, inferior to Hawes. His elegies on Edward IV (1483) and on the Earl of Northumberland (1489) reveal nothing of his later quality. We may probably assign to the same period (and certainly relegate to the same oblivion) three heavily aureate poems addressed to the Persons of the Trinity, a poem on Time, and an amatory ‘Go Piteous Heart’. The only effect of all these is to set us thinking how much better they did such things in Scotland.
With the ‘Bouge of Court’ (probably written in 1498 or 1499) we reach work which is of real value, but we do not reach the fully ‘Skeltonic’ Skelton. The ‘Bouge’ is just as characteristic of the late Middle Ages as the previous poems; the difference is that it is good. There is no novelty, though there is great merit, in its satiric and realistic use of the dream allegory. The form had been used satirically by Jean de Meung and Chaucer and had always admitted realistic detail; in the ‘Flower and the Leaf and the ‘Assembly of Ladies’ it had offered almost nothing else. The merit of Skelton lies not in innovation but in using well an established tradition for a purpose to which it is excellently suited. The subject is a perennial one — the bewilderment, and finally the terror, of a man at his first introduction to what theologians call ‘the World’ and others ‘the racket’ or ‘real life’. Things overheard, things misunderstood, a general and steadily growing sense of being out of one's depth, fill the poem with a Kafka-like uneasiness. As was natural in Tudor times the particular ‘world’ or ‘racket’ described in the court; but almost any man in any profession can recognize most of the encounters — the direct, unprovoked snub from Danger (‘She asked me if ever I drank of sauces cup’ [line 73]), the effusive welcome of Favell, the confidential warnings of Suspect. the apparently light-hearted good fellowship of Harvy Hafter (but the very sight of him sets your purse shivering), and the downright bullying of Disdain. It ends in nightmare with the hero leaping over the ship's side: his name, which is Drede, gives the keynote to the whole dream. The metre is chaotic, but the poem almost succeeds in spite of it.
So far, if my chronology is correct, we have seen Skelton working along the lines marked out for him by his immediate predecessors. He was to do so again in the Flyting ‘Against Garnesche’ (1513–14), in ‘The Garland of Laurel’ (1523), and in the huge morality play of ‘Magnificence’ (1515–16) which I surrender to the historians of drama. But in the next group of poems which we must consider we are confronted with a different and almost wholly unexpected Skelton. The pieces in this group cannot be accurately dated. ‘Philip Sparrow’ was certainly written before 1509. ‘Ware the Hawk’ was obviously written while Skelton was resident at Diss, and therefore probably between 1502 and 1511. The ‘Epitaphe’ (on ‘two knaves sometime of Diss’) cannot be earlier than 1506 when the will of one of the ‘knaves’ was proved. The ‘Ballad of the Scottish King’ and its revised version ‘Against the Scots’ must have been composed in the year of Flodden (1513). The ‘Tunning’ I cannot date, for the fact that the real Alianora Romyng was in trouble for excessive prices and small measures in 1525 does not much help us.
The most obvious characteristic of all the poems in this group is the so-called Skeltonic metre; ‘so-called’, for by some standards it is hardly a metre at all. The number of beats in the line varies from two (‘Tell you I chill’ [‘Elynor Rummyng’, line 1]) to five (‘To anger the Scots and Irish keterings with all [‘Against the Scots’, line 83]) with a preference for three. The rhyme is hardly ever crossed and any given rhyme may be repeated as long as the resources of the language hold out. In other words there is neither metre nor rhyme scheme in the strict sense; the only constant characteristic is the fact of rhyming. Scholars have shown much learning in their attempts to find a source for this extraordinary kind of composition. Short lines with irregular rhyme have been found in medieval Latin verse, but they do not show the Skeltonic irregularity of rhythm. More recently attention has been drawn to the rhyming passages in later medieval Latin prose; and in an earlier chapter we have noticed something faintly like Skeltonics in such Scotch poems as ‘Cowkelbie Sow’ and ‘Lord Fergus' Gaist’. This is not the only affinity between Skelton and his Scotch contemporaries; his ‘Lullay, Lullay’ (not to be confused with the noble carol) and his ‘Jolly Rutterkin’ may be regarded as poor relations of the comic lyric about low life which we find in the Scotch anthologies. Skelton himself would rise from the grave to bespatter us with new Skeltonics if we suggested that he had learned his art from a Scotchman: but these affinities may suggest (they certainly do not prove) some common tradition whose documents are now lost but from which the lower types of early sixteenth-century poetry, both Scotch and English, have descended. But whatever view is finally taken it remains true that there is nothing really very like Skeltonics before Skelton, and that his practice alone gives them any importance. Hints and vague anticipations there may have been, but I suspect that he was the real inventor.
The problem about the source of Skeltonics sinks into insignificance beside the critical problem. A form whose only constant attribute is rhyme ought to be intolerable: it is indeed the form used by every clown scribbling on the wall in an inn yard. How then does Skelton please? It is, no doubt, true to say that he sometimes does not. Where the poem is bad on other grounds the Skeltonics make it worse. In the ‘Ballad of the Scottish King’ the rodomontade of the non-combatant, the government scribbler's cheap valiancy, is beneath contempt, and qualifies the poet for the epithet ‘beastly’ far more than ‘Elinor Rumming’; and in the revised version the sinister hint that those who disliked the ‘Ballad’ must be no true friends of the king adds the last touch of degradation. Here the looseness of the form does not help matters: it aggravates the vulgarity. This can be seen by turning to the similar poem on ‘The Doughty Duke of Albany’ (1523) where the ‘Envoy’, by dint of its strict trimeter quatrains, is much more tolerable than the main body of the poem. Where thought grovels, form must be severe: satire that is merely abusive is most tolerable in stopped coulets. But, of course, there would be no problem if all Skelton's Skeltonic poems had been on this level. The real question is about ‘Elinor Rumming’ and ‘Philip Sparrow’. I am not at all sure that we can find the answer, but we may at least eliminate one false trail. They certainly do not please by the poet's ‘facility in rhyme’ considered as virtuosity. On Skelton's terms any man can rhyme as long as he pleases.
In modern language the kind to which ‘Philip Sparrow’ belongs may roughly be called the mock-heroic, though the term must here be stretched to cover the mock-religious as well. Requiem is sung for the pet bird. At the appropriate place in the poem, as in ‘Lycidas’, the mourner remembers that ‘her sorrow is not dead’ and asks
But where unto shuld I
Lenger morne or crye?[lines 594–5]
Solemn execration is pronounced on Gib our cat (mountain of mantichores are to eat his brain) and on the whole nation of cats. She calls on the great moralists of antiquity to teach her how to moderate her passion. Thus, superficially, the humour is of the same kind as in ‘The Rape of the Lock’: much ado about nothing. But Pope's intention was ostensibly corrective; if Skelton had any such intention it got lost early in the process of composition. It may indeed be thought that something of the same kind happened to Pope, that he loved, if not Belinda, yet her toilet, and the tea-cups, and the ‘shining altars of Japan’, and would have been very little pleased with any ‘reform of manners’ which interfered with them. But if such love for the thing he mocks was one element in Pope's attitude, it is the whole of Skelton's. ‘Philip Sparrow’ is our first great poem of childhood. The lady who is lamenting her bird may not really have been a child — Skelton's roguish reference to the beauties hidden beneath her kirtle (itself a medieval commonplace) may seem to suggest the reverse. But it is as a child she is imagined in the poem — a little girl to whom the bird's death is a tragedy and who, though well read in romances, finds Lydgate beyond her and has ‘little skill in Ovid or Virgil’. We seem to hear her small reed-like voice throughout, and to move in a demure, dainty, luxurious, in-door world. Skelton is not (as Blake might have done) suggesting that such ‘sorrows small’ may be real tragedies from within; nor is he, in any hostile sense, ridiculing them. He is at once tender and mocking — like an affectionate bachelor uncle or even a grandfather. Of course, he is not consistently dramatic and by no means confines himself to things that the supposed speaker could really have said: a good deal of his own learning is allowed to creep in. The mood of the poem is too light to require strict consistency. It is indeed the lightest — the most like a bubble — of all the poems I know. It would break at a touch: but hold your breath, watch it, and it is almost perfect. The Skeltonics are essential to its perfection. Their prattling and hopping and their inconsequence, so birdlike and so childlike, are the best possible embodiment of the theme. We should not, I think, refuse to call this poem great; perfection in light poetry, perfect smallness, is among the rarest of literary achievements.
In the ‘Tunning of Elinor Rumming’ the metre has a more obvious and, I think, less fruitful appropriateness to the subject. Skelton here lets himself loose on the humours of an inn presided over by a dirty old ale wife. Her customers are all women, confirmed drinkers, who mostly pay for their beer in kind — one brings a rabbit, another her shoes, another her husband's hood, one her wedding ring. We have noisome details about Elinor's methods of brewing, and there are foul words, foul breath, and foul sights in plenty. The merit of the thing lies in its speed: guests are arriving hotfoot, ordering, quarrelling, succumbing to the liquor, every moment. We get a vivid impression of riotous bustle, chatter, and crazy disorder. All is ugly, but all is alive. The poem has thus a good deal in common with ‘Peblis to the Play’ or ‘Christis Kirk on the Green’: what it lacks is their melody and gaiety. The poet, and we, may laugh, but we hardly enter into the enjoyment of his ‘sort of foul drabs’. It is here that the metre most fully justifies Mr. Graves's description of Skelton as ‘helter-skelter John’. The shapeless volley of rhymes does really suggest the helter-skelter arrival of all these thirsty old trots. But there is much less invention in it than in ‘Philip Sparrow’. The technique is much more crudely related to the matter; disorder in life rendered by disorder in art. This is in poetry what ‘programme music’ is in music; the thing is legitimate, it works, but we cannot forget that the art has much better cards in its hand.
If I see these two poems at all correctly, we may now hazard a guess at the answer to our critical problem. The Skeltonic, which defies all the rules of art, pleases (on a certain class of subjects) because — and when — this helter-skelter artlessness symbolizes something in the theme. Childishness, dipsomania, and a bird are the themes on which we have found it successful. When it attempts to treat something fully human and adult — as in the Flodden poem — it fails; as it does also, to my mind, in ‘The Duke of Albany’ (1523) and the unpleasant ‘Replicacioun’ (1528). The other poems in which Skelton has used it most successfully are ‘Colin Clout’ and ‘Why Come Ye Not to Court?’ (1522).
All right minded readers start these two lampoons with a prejudice in favour of the poet: however he writes, the man who defies all but omnipotent government cannot be contemptible. But these poems have a real, and very curious, merit. I would describe it as anonymity. The technique, to be sure, is highly personal; but the effect produced is that of listening to the voice of the people itself. A vast muttering and growling of rumours fills our ears; ‘Lay men say’ … ‘Men say’ … ‘the temporality say’ … ‘I tell you as men say’ … ‘they crye and they yelle’ … ‘I here the people talke’ … ‘What newes? What newes?’ … ‘What here ye of Lancashire?’ … ‘What here ye of the Lord Dacres?’ … ‘is Maister Meautis dede?’ Thus to hand over responsibility to a vague on dit is no doubt a common trick of satirists: but thus repeated, thus with cumulative effect accompanying Skelton's almost endless denunciations, it acquires a strange and disquieting potency. It may be the truth that Wolsey needed to care for Skelton no more than Bishop Blougram for Gigadibs, and that the forgiveness for which the poet paid heavily in flattery was the forgiveness of tranquil contempt. But our imaginative experience in reading the poems ignores this possibility. In them Skelton has ceased to be a man and become a mob: we hear thousands of him murmuring and finally thundering at the gates of Hampton Court. And here once again the Skeltonics help him. Their shapeless garrulity, their lack of steady progression are (for this purpose) no defect. But he is very near the borders of art. He is saved by the skin of his teeth. No one wishes the poems longer, and a few more in the same vein would be intolerable.
But Skelton's abusive vein was not confined to Skeltonics. In the astonishing ‘Speke Parot’ (1521) he had returned to rhyme royal. This poem exists in two widely divergent texts; in the Harleian MS. it is mainly an attack on Wolsey, in the early print, mainly an attack on Greek studies; both are put into the mouth of the Parrot and both are almost wholly unintelligible. The obscurity is doubtless denser now than it was in 1521, but it was there from the beginning and is certainly intentional. Modern scholars have laboured with great diligence, and not without success, to dissipate it, but a critical judgement on the poem cannot be made with any confidence; not that we have no literary experiences while we read, but that we have no assurance whether they are at all like those the poet intended to give us. The very first lines have for me their own whimsical charm:
[Quotes lines 3–6.]
His curiously carven cage, his mirror for him to ‘toot in’, the maidens strewing the cage with fresh flowers and saying ‘Speak parrot’, the utter inconsequence (as it seems to us) of the statement ‘In Poperynge grew paires when Parot was an egge’ [line 72] — all this delights us scarcely less than the voyage of the Owl and the Pussycat or the Hunting of the Snark. The same crazy sort of pleasure can be derived from lines like
For Ierichoe and Ierseye shall mete together as sone
As he to exployte the man out of the mone [lines 307–8]
or
To brynge all the sea to a chirrystone pytte.[line 331]
This raises in some minds the question whether we are reading the first of the nonsense poets, or whether Skelton is anticipating the moderns and deliberately launching poetry on ‘the stream of consciousness’. I believe not. I fear the poem was not meant to be nonsense: it is nonsense to us because it is a cryptogram of which we have lost the key. Our pleasure in it may be almost wholly foreign to Skelton's purpose and to his actual achievement in 1521; almost, not quite, because unless his mind had been stocked with curious images, even the disorder into which they necessarily fall for us who know too little of the real links between them, would not affect us as it does. His modern admirers are thus really in touch with a certain level of Skelton's mind, but probably not of his art, when they enjoy ‘Speke Parot’.
In the ‘Garland of Laurel’ (1523) Skelton returns, as far as the main body of the poem is concerned, to the broad highway of medieval poetry. The occasion of the poem was a desire to compliment the Countess of Surrey and certain other ladies: its form, stanzaic allegory: its characters, Skelton as dreamer, Pallas, Fame, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. The catalogue of ‘laureate’ poets is enlivened by a refrain about Bacchus which has a hearty ring, but the only other good passage (that where Daphne, though already tree, quivers at Apollo's touch) is from Ovid. All that is of value in this production is contained in the seven lyric addresses to ladies which are inserted at the end. Only one of these (‘Gertrude Statham’) is exactly Skeltonic, though ‘Margaret Hussey’ comes near to being so. ‘Jane Blennerhasset’ and ‘Isabel Pennell’ have the short, irregular lines, but there is in both a real rhyme-scheme. ‘Margert Wentworth’, ‘Margaret Tylney’, and ‘Isabel Knight’ are in stanzas. Some of these are very good indeed: what astonishes one is the simplicity of the resources from which the effect has been produced. In ‘Margery Wentworth’, which is twenty lines long, the same four lines are thrice repeated. Of the eight lines which remain to be filled up by a fresh effort of imagination, one is wasted (and in so tiny a poem) on rubble like ‘Plainly I cannot glose’. Yet the thing succeeds — apparently by talking about flowers and sounding kind. ‘Isabel Pennell’ captures us at once by the opening lines, which sound as if the ‘baby’ (whether she really was an infant matters nothing) had been shown to him that moment for the first time and the song had burst out ex tempore. After that, the flowers, the April showers, the bird, and ‘star of the morrow gray’ (only slightly improved by the fact that morrow is now an archaism) do the rest. ‘Margaret Hussey’ lives only by the opening quatrain: just as that very different lyric ‘Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale’ (which Cornish set) lives almost entirely on the line which makes its title.
The tenderness, though not the playfulness, of these little pieces is found also in ‘Now sing we’, and also, with much more elaborate art, in the fine devotional lyric ‘Woefully Arrayed’. If this is by Skelton it is the only piece in which he does not appear to be artless.
It may naturally be asked whether this artlessness in Skelton is real or apparent: and, if apparent, whether it is not the highest art. I myself think that it is real. The result is good only when he is either playful or violently abusive, when the shaping power which we ordinarily demand of a poet is either admittedly on holiday or may be supposed to be suspended by rage. In either of these two veins, but especially in the playful, his lack of all real control and development is suitable to the work in hand. In ‘Philip Sparrow’ or ‘Margery Wentworth’ he ‘prattles out of fashion’ but that is just what is required. We are disarmed; we feel that to criticize such poetry is like trying to make a child discontented with a toy which Skelton has given it. That is one of the paradoxes of Skelton: in speaking of his own work he is arrogant (though perhaps even then with a twinkle in his eye), but the work itself, at its best, dances round or through our critical defences by its extreme unpretentiousness — an unpretentiousness quite without parallel in our literature. But I think there is more nature than art in this happy result. Skelton does not know the peculiar powers and limitations of his own manner, and does not reserve it, as an artist would have done, for treating immature or disorganized states of consciousness. When he happens to apply it to such states, we may get delightful poetry: when to others, verbiage. There is no building in his work, no planning, no reason why any piece should stop just where it does (sometimes his repeated envoys make us wonder if it is going to stop at all), and no kind of assurance that any of his poems is exactly the poem he intended to write. Hence his intimacy. He is always in undress. Hence his charm, the charm of the really gifted amateur (a very different person from the hard working inferior artist). I am not unaware that some modern poets would put Skelton higher than this. But I think that when they do so they are being poets, not critics. The things that Mr. Graves gets out of Skelton's work are much better than anything that Skelton put in. That is what we should expect: achievement has a finality about it, where the unfinished work of a rich, fanciful mind, full of possibilities just because it is unfinished, may be the strongest stimulant to the reader when that reader is a true poet. Mr. Graves, Mr. Auden, and others receive from Skelton principally what they give and in their life, if not alone, yet eminently, does Skelton live. Yet no student of the early sixteenth century comes away from Skelton uncheered. He has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual, a man we have met.