Probably born in Suffolk. Educated at Oxford. Groom of Chamber to Henry VII. Died, about 1523 (?). Works: “The Passetyme of Pleasure,” 1506; “The Conversyon of Swerers,” 1509; “A Joyfull Medytacyon” (1509); “A Compendyous story … called the Example of Vertu” (1512?); “The Comfort of Lovers,” n. d.
Very little is known of Stephen Hawes, and that little does not include the date either of his birth or of his death. He is said to have been a gentleman of birth, an Oxford man, a pretty considerable traveller, a master of modern languages, a man of great memory (seeing he could repeat by heart the works of Lydgate), and the possessor of a critical faculty somewhat smaller, inasmuch as he made that voluminous person equal in some respects with Geoffrey Chaucer. It is said with probability that he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII.; he certainly wrote verses to congratulate Henry VIII. on his accession; and it seems likely that he died in Suffolk in early middle age, certainly before 1530, and probably about 1523.
| Go, little boke! I praye God the save | |
| From misse metryng by wrong impression; | |
| And who that ever list the for to have, | |
| That he perceyve well thyne intencion, | |
| For to be grounded without presumption, | |
| As for to eschue the synne of ydlenes; | |
| To make suche bokes I apply my busines. |
Such is the Fate of Poetry, that this Book, which in the Time of Henry 7 and 8, was taken into the Hands of all ingenious men, is now thought but worthy of a Ballad-monger’s Stall!
If the poems of Rowlie are not genuine, the “Pastime of Pleasure” is almost the only effort of imagination and invention which had yet appeared in our poetry since Chaucer. This poem contains no common touches of romantic and allegoric fiction. The personifications are often happily sustained, and indicate the writer’s familiarity with the Provençal school. The model of his versification and phraseology is that improved harmony of numbers, and facility of diction, with which his predecessor Lydgate adorned our octavo stanza. But Hawes has added new graces to Lydgate’s manner.
Graund Amour (true Gallantry), the hero of the piece, falls asleep and sees a vision. He receives from Fame the first account of La Belle Pucelle (perfect Beauty), and is by her referred for farther particulars to the Tower of Doctrine. Here, certainly, is a beginning very much in the spirit of the times; but the subsequent conduct of the poem is not very well calculated to gratify the impatience of any reader who shall have taken a lively interest in the success of Graund Amour’s passion. An accurate knowledge of the seven sciences, viz. grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, does not seem to be indispensably requisite to the success of a love adventure. These sciences, it is true, are all ladies; but many of them are dreadfully prolix in their instructions.
In this work the personified characters have all the capriciousness and vague moral meaning of the old French allegorical romance; but the puerility of the school remains, while the zest of its novelty is gone. There is also in his foolish personage of Godfrey Gobelive, something of the burlesque of the worst taste of Italian poetry. It is certainly very tiresome to follow Hawes’s hero, Grandamour, through all his adventures, studying grammar, rhetoric, and arithmetic, in the tower of Doctrine; afterwards slaughtering giants, who have each two or three emblematic heads; sacrificing to heathen gods; then marrying according to the Catholic rites; and, finally, relating his own death and burial, to which he is so obliging as to add his epitaph. Yet, as the story seems to be of Hawes’s invention, it ranks him above the mere chroniclers and translators of the age.
The popularity of Hawes, whatever it might have been during his own time, must now depend on a perusal of the analysis of his “Pastime of Pleasure” by Warton. The whole of this piece of criticism is the masterly effort of an ingenious and eloquent advocate. The sentence of Mr. Campbell, less favourable to the reputation of the poet, appears to be more consistent with the canons of just criticism.
Skelton, a contemporary with Hawes, falls below him, as well in style and diction, as in taste and invention.
Those who require the ardent words or the harmonious grace of poetical diction will not frequently be content with Hawes. Unlike many of our older versifiers, he would be judged more unfavorably by extracts than by a general view of his long work. He is rude, obscure, full of pedantic Latinisms, and probably has been disfigured in the press; but learned and philosophical, reminding us frequently of the school of James I. The best, though probably an unexpected parallel for Hawes, is John Bunyan: their inventions are of the same class, various and novel, though with no remarkable pertinence to the leading subject, or naturally consecutive order; their characters, though abstract in name, have a personal truth about them, in which Phineas Fletcher, a century after Hawes, fell much below him; they render the general allegory subservient to inculcating a system, the one of philosophy, the other of religion. I do not mean that the “Pastime of Pleasure” is equal in merit, as it certainly has not been in success, to the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan is powerful and picturesque from his concise simplicity; Hawes has the common failings of our old writers, a tedious and languid diffuseness, an expatiating on themes of pedantry in which the reader takes no interest, a weakening of every picture and every reflection by ignorance of the touches that give effect. But, if we consider the “Historie of Graunde Amour” less as a poem to be read than as a measure of the author’s mental power, we shall not look down upon so long and well-sustained an allegory.
“The Pastime of Pleasure,” which Warton characterises as his “capital work,” is one of those allegorical writings which were popular with our forefathers, but which can now only be looked upon as monuments of the bad taste of a bad age. It is however a monument; and being one of the most remarkable productions between the age of Lydgate and that of Wyatt and Surrey, it deserves to be reprinted as one of the links in the history of English poetry, without which that history would be incomplete. The old editions of this poem are very rare.
His model and master was, as he is constantly reiterating, Lydgate, though he was well acquainted with the works of Chaucer, whose comic vein he occasionally affects, with the verses of Gower, and with the narrative poetry of France and Italy. His poem is elaborately allegorical, though the allegory is not always easy to follow in detail, and is obviously much impeded with extraneous matter. The style has little of the fluency of Lydgate, and none of his vigour; the picturesqueness and brilliance which are characteristic of Chaucer are not less characteristic of Chaucer’s Scotch disciples who were Hawes’ contemporaries. The narrative, though by no means lacking incident, and by no means unenlivened with beauties both of sentiment and expression, too often stagnates in prolix discussions, and wants as a rule life and variety. The composition is often loose and feeble, the vocabulary is singularly limited, and bad taste is conspicuous in every canto. But Hawes, with all his faults, is a true poet. He has a sweet simplicity, a pensive gentle air, a subdued cheerfulness about him which have a strange charm at this distance of dissimilar time. Though the hand of the artist is not firm, and the colouring sometimes too sober, his pictures are very graphic.
Has certainly one of the most misleading titles to be found in English literature. The trivial and the careless, least of all, need delude themselves with the fancy that it was for them the work was designed. It provides just the sort of pastime and furnishes just the degree of pleasure that might be expected from one who looked upon Lydgate as his master and took him for his model.
Other parts of a true poet, in the care spent mainly on essentials of life, in choice and treatment of his fable, Stephen Hawes had; but if he wrote his lines as they are printed, he was not skilled in the mechanism of his art. He was held by the ears when he was dipped in Helicon.
Hawes is very far from being able to compete with Lydgate in poetic productivity, yet he excels him, perhaps, in the art of invention and in working out allegorical motives. The style of art exhibited here is certainly of questionable value, but we must not overlook the fact that even Hawes forms a step in the ladder that leads up to Spenser…. His language is tolerably fluent, but little accurate and to the point; smooth, it is true, but bare and unsatisfactory. He shows undoubted talent for versification, yet, like other poets of his day, he was troubled by the struggle between the rigidity of scholastic tradition, and the progressive development of the language; it may also be that the type-setter has, at times, spoiled his verse…. Of the spirit of humanism, Hawes shows about as much as his master, Lydgate—that is, very little.
Here we have the unmistakable sign-manual of the literary dilettante, of one who would establish an esoteric cult in poetry by reversing the popular, the vulgar estimate, who seeks distinction by an amiable eccentricity of judgment, an affectation of special insight. Hawes was in fact the representative man of letters of the reign, the exponent of its culture; he was its product, for he was yet young when towards its close he composed his principal work. He was an ornament of the court, being in great request for his talents in composition, conversation and recitation from the elder poets—for he had a capacious memory. The king made him his Groom of the Chamber.
The style of the composition is as languid and prolix as might be expected from its motive, and the versification gives no sign of the approach of Surrey. One beautiful image has survived the insipidities of which the poem is mainly composed, and has secured a place in the national memory:—
| For though the dayës be nevir so long, | |
| At last the bellës ringeth to evensong. |
There is both learning and philosophy in Hawes, but his style is pedantic and obscure.
