In George Sayer's biography of C. S. Lewis, Sayer discusses Lewis's contribution to
The Oxford History of English Literature, in which Lewis discusses British writers of the sixteenth century. Over the years, this book has become a classic of literary scholarship. Sayer's summary of Lewis's views of Renaissance humanism, Calvinism, Tyndale, More, and Hooker is notable:
The study begins with a startling and controversial general survey. In the early part of the sixteenth century English poetry was dull, monotonous, and drab. Then suddenly it seemed reborn, and by the end of the century it was rich in fantasy, paradox, color, and incantation, just the qualities we find in the sonnets of Shakespeare. Literary historians before Jack had given credit for this to the Renaissance. He disagreed. The Renaissance in his view was brought about by the humanists. They recovered, edited, and wrote commentaries on the classics with an exaggerated concern for form, polish, and exactness of language. They killed Latin by refusing to let it develop and grow. They produced a literature remote from the senses and the soil. They hated the Middle Ages, particularly chivalrous romance and scholastic philosophy. Humanism was a Philistine movement. "The new learning created the new ignorance."
After his crusade against the humanists--and it amounted to that--Jack tells us that our view of the Puritans is wrong. The Protestant doctrine of salvation by grace is not gloomy or terrifying; it is joyous. The Puritans praised the marriage bed; it was the Catholics who exalted virginity. As for Calvin, his "was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. . . . The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings were likely to be Calvinists. He was a dazzling figure, a man born to be the idol of revolutionary intellectuals." All this and much more come in the first sixty pages. The controversy provoked by their brilliance has not yet died down.
The rest of the book consists of a review of all the major and many writers of the period. Over and over again we are swept away by his enthusiasms and the quotations he has found to illustrate them. There are new discoveries, such as Tyndale as a great prose writer. He quotes: "Where the spirit is there is always summer. Who taught the eagles to spy out their prey? Even so the children of God spy out their father. That they might see love and love again." In his comparison of Tyndale and More Jack writes: "In More we feel all the smoke and stir of London; the very plodding of his sentences is like horse traffic in the streets. In Tyndale we breathe mountain air." From Richard Hooker, another discovery, he does not quote much, "for very few of Hooker's beauties can be picked like flowers and taken home: you must enjoy them were they grow--as you would enjoy a twenty acre field of ripe wheat."
