S

WICLIF:

AN HISTORICAL DRAMA.

OME little time ago I was walking down the famous High Street of Oxford, and wondering how I should compose an article for the July Hobby Horse. My

uncertainty was not caused altogether by the want of a subject; but, as it is my duty to notice current literature, I hardly knew where to meet with a recent book which would afford me a pretext for saying what I wanted. By good luck my eyes fell upon a small volume, lying in Mr. Thornton's window, which bore the name that heads this article: "Wiclif, An Historical Drama." The title attracted me, I went in, bought the volume, and read it; and I am reviewing it now because it has enabled me to introduce the subject about which I desired to speak.

This drama is anonymous, an advertisement on the fly-leaf states that it is by the author of "Bertha"; a statement which, to me at least, conveys no light, since I have not had the privilege of reading "Bertha." On the binding there is the design of an outstretched sail upon a rolling sea; there is a Dedication which implies that the writer was at school within walking distance of Lutterworth: beyond this there is nothing to identify him. But the book is published here in Oxford; and from the style, the form, and the treatment of the subject, I gather that the anonymous author is very far from the maturity of his powers. This assumption induces me to speak more

frankly of his work than I should otherwise feel justified in doing ; for I am bound to add that though I look forward with hopeful confidence to his future achievements, I do not think too highly of his actual performance.

The drama covers a period of ten years, from 1374-1384; this of itself is, perhaps, somewhat against its effectiveness, and against its acting capabilities. It begins with Wiclif's entrance upon political life, it treats of his various persecutions by the ecclesiastical authorities, and it ends with his sudden death at Lutterworth. The important events of the peasants' rising, and of their rebellion under Wat Tyler in 1381, are mentioned only as an incident; and the very unimportant close of Wicklif's life, in 1384, is made the climax of the play. I would suggest to the author that by following this construction he has missed his opportunity; for surely the most dramatic episode in Wiclif's career was when his theories were wildly and violently worked out in practice by disciples whose logical enthusiasm he was anxious to disown. This has been the fate of innumerable reformers, of Luther, for instance, of the chiefs of the Long Parliament, of the French Encyclopædists; and the sight of misguided, tempestuous zeal outrunning all discretion must be more bitter, to a true reformer, than any persecution. The play, thus, to my mind, falls a little flat.

In addition to this general weakness of structure and conception, the last fourteen lines of the first Act are formed into one of those irregular, illegitimate cadences which, in these slovenly days of ours, are miscalled Sonnets; as if any chance arrangement of fourteen lines had the right to assume that severe, that most artistic and exclusive designation. The success of this experiment does not justify its existence, and will not, I hope, encourage its repetition.

To relieve his play, the author has invented a flirtation between an imaginary niece of Wiclif and a young priest who is one of his most eager disciples. This love-story is the freshest and pleasantest part of the drama; but, however pleasing it may be in itself, I doubt very much whether such a courtship would have been approved by Wiclif, or whether the public opinion of the fourteenth century would have tolerated so unconventional a romance. I have less doubt when I inform the author that Mass was not celebrated in the evening, during the middle ages: whatever the custom may have been in the Apostolic century; and that the service of Benediction was wholly unknown, in England at least, in the orthodox days before the Reformation. It is, perhaps, an excusable mistake to speak of the "Five Mendicant Orders," in Wiclif's time; though I believe that the Servites were not legally recognized, as the fifth order of Friars, until the next century; and, in any case, they had no house in England until quite modern times. It is somewhat peculiar to describe the Bishop of London as "the Bishop of Saint Paul's"; and it is hardly correct to speak of mendicant monks, though in this perversion of terms the author is countenanced by no less an authority than Prescott: for he talks about "Benedictine Friars." By an error which surely must be the printer's, and not the author's, John of Gaunt is twice made to speak of Edward III. as his "brother."

In his Preface, too, the author states that :—“ Wiclif stands at the commencement of the introduction of the Reformative Principle into England, whose (sic) history began for us in 1066"; and:-"With Wiclif, as from a water-spring on the mountain side, began that stream of English liberty which ever widening and widening supports us and is our life now." The "Reformative Principle" which was introduced in 1066 was not what is usually meant when those terms

are employed. The Norman Conquest introduced a most necessary reformation of discipline into the English Church; but, so far from introducing Reform in the Protestant sense, it led to the complete feudalization of the Church, and to an immense development of Papal interference and usurpation. While "the stream of English liberty" is a little more ancient than the century of Wiclif; indeed, after the reign of Edward I., instead of "ever widening," it flows with increasing confinement and difficulty till its course is almost choked by the personal sovereignty of the Yorkist kings, and the organized despotism of the Tudors. The teaching of Wiclif, and of the Lollards after him, seems to have had no effect whatever in hindering this political decadence.

I have said a great deal more than I intended in dispraise of "Wiclif"; but I have been tempted to dwell on many of its blemishes because they are not peculiar to this play, or to its author. They are, almost universally, the common property of writers who touch upon the feelings, the customs, and the institutions of the medieval Church. They are blemishes which exemplify this most important truth; that, except to those who believe in her Infallibility, the Roman Church is the best, indeed the indispensable, mistress of discerning and sympathetic history. We have, in some measure, outgrown the unreal mediævalism of the writers of fifty years ago, who made every third sentence contain an invocation to the Madonna. This affectation pervades the novels of G. P. R. James, there is a trace of it in Lord Tennyson's "Queen Mary," and in parts of "Wiclif" such exclamations are too frequent and obtrusive.

But let me turn now to the positive qualities of our play. To begin with, there are several beautiful lyrics scattered up and down it. The whole cast of the plot is manly and straightforward, there is

no hesitation or obscurity about it. The action never flags, the characters live and are vigorous; and sometimes they utter fine and even prophetical truths: as, for example, when the Archbishop says, speaking of Oxford:-

Where learning is, obstruction's sure to lurk.

But I will not quote specimens, or talk about "fine passages;" because one of the most crying evils of our current reviews is that they persist in judging poems, and pictures too, by isolated fragments, instead of regarding them as living organisms, as indivisible artistic existences. On the whole, then, I wish to leave with my readers a good impression of Wiclif. I can honestly advise them to read the play, and still more do I recommend them to watch for the future writings of the "Author of Bertha."

I have been desirous, for some time, to write about a mediæval subject in these pages; because the middle age, on its artistic side, is full of interest and instruction; and it exemplifies, in every branch of art, the success and the necessity of those principles of artistic workmanship which are advocated by the Century Guild. The despised middle age is full of teaching for us all, and more especially for those of us who are artists. But its teaching is not easily learnt ; for even now the long period, of widely differing centuries, which we lump together so superficially as the middle age, is comparatively unknown. It is to be hoped that some writer will treat this interesting time as Mr. Symonds has treated the Renaissance. Much would be gained if Mr. Pater would give us a series of studies like his Denys L'Auxerrois"; for he puts more sympathy and insight into one of his inimitable essays, than a less gifted artist could express in a whole lifetime of authorship.