Produced by Charlene Taylor, Paul Dring and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE
+---------------------------------------------+
| |
| A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE |
| |
| _In Six Volumes, Crown 8vo._ |
| |
| ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING |
| TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST. By Rev. STOPFORD |
| A. BROOKE, M.A. 8s. 6d. |
| |
| ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE NORMAN |
| CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. By Prof. W. H. |
| SCHOFIELD, Ph.D. 8s. 6d. |
| |
| THE AGE OF CHAUCER. By Professor W. H. |
| SCHOFIELD, Ph.D. [_In preparation._ |
| |
| ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE (1560-1665). By |
| GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 8s. 6d. |
| |
| EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1660-1780). |
| By EDMUND GOSSE, M.A. 8s. 6d. |
| |
| NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1780-1900). |
| By GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 8s. 6d. |
| |
| |
| By GEORGE SAINTSBURY. |
| |
| A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |
| Crown 8vo. 10s. Also in five Parts. |
| 2s. 6d. each. |
| |
| A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSODY FROM |
| THE TWELFTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT DAY. |
| 3 vols. 8vo. |
| Vol. I. From the Origins to Spenser. |
| 12s. 6d. net. |
| Vol. II. From Shakespeare to Crabbe. |
| 18s. net. |
| Vol. III. From Blake to Mr. Swinburne. |
| 18s. net. |
| |
| HISTORICAL MANUAL OF ENGLISH PROSODY. |
| Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net. |
| |
| A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL. 8vo. |
| Vol. I. From the Beginning to 1880. |
| 18s. net. |
| Vol. II. From 1800 to 1900. 18s. net. |
| |
| A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM. |
| 8vo. 18s. net. |
| |
| LIFE OF DRYDEN. Library Edition. |
| Crown 8vo, 3s. net; Pocket Edition, |
| Fcap. 8vo, 2s. net. |
| [_English Men of Letters._ |
| |
| A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |
| Globe 8vo. Sewed, 2s. Stiff Boards, |
| 2s. 3d. |
| |
| NOTES ON A CELLAR-BOOK. Small 4to. |
| 7s. 6d. net. |
| |
| MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON. |
| |
+---------------------------------------------+
A HISTORY
OF
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1920
COPYRIGHT
_First Edition_ 1887. _Second Edition_ 1890.
_Reprinted_ 1893, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1901, 1903, 1907, 1910, 1913, 1918,
1920.
PREFACE TO NINTH EDITION
As was explained in the Note to the Preface of the previous editions and
impressions of this book, after the first, hardly one of them appeared
without careful revision, and the insertion of a more or less considerable
number of additions and corrections. I found, indeed, few errors of a kind
that need have seemed serious except to Momus or Zoilus. But in the
enormous number of statements of fact which literary history of the more
exact kind requires, minor blunders, be they more or fewer, are sure to
creep in. No writer, again, who endeavours constantly to keep up and extend
his knowledge of such a subject as Elizabethan literature, can fail to have
something new to say from time to time. And though no one who is competent
originally for his task ought to experience any violent changes of view,
any one's views may undergo modification. In particular, he may find that
readers have misunderstood him, and that alterations of expression are
desirable. For all these reasons and others I have not spared trouble in
the various revisions referred to; I think the book has been kept by them
fairly abreast of its author's knowledge, and I hope it is not too far
behind that of others.
It will, however, almost inevitably happen that a long series of piecemeal
corrections and codicils somewhat disfigures the character of the
composition as a whole. And after nearly the full score of years, and not
much less than half a score of re-appearances, it has seemed to me
desirable to make a somewhat more thorough, minute, and above all connected
revision than I have ever made before. And so, my publishers falling in
with this view, the present edition represents the result. I do not think
it necessary to reprint the original preface. When I wrote it I had already
had some, and since I wrote it I have had much more, experience in writing
literary history. I have never seen reason to alter the opinion that, to
make such history of any value at all, the critical judgments and
descriptions must represent direct, original, and first-hand reading and
thought; and that in these critical judgments and descriptions the value of
it consists. Even summaries and analyses of the matter of books, except in
so far as they are necessary to criticism, come far second; while
biographical and bibliographical details are of much less importance, and
may (as indeed in one way or another they generally must) be taken at
second hand. The completion of the _Dictionary of National Biography_ has
at once facilitated the task of the writer, and to a great extent disarmed
the candid critic who delights, in cases of disputed date, to assume that
the date which his author chooses is the wrong one. And I have in the main
adjusted the dates in this book (where necessary) accordingly. The
bibliographical additions which have been made to the Index will be found
not inconsiderable.
I believe that, in my present plan, there is no author of importance
omitted (there were not many even in the first edition), and that I have
been able somewhat to improve the book from the results of twenty years'
additional study, twelve of which have been mainly devoted to English
literature. How far it must still be from being worthy of its subject,
nobody can know better than I do. But I know also, and I am very happy to
know, that, as an Elizabethan himself might have said, my unworthiness has
guided many worthy ones to something like knowledge, and to what is more
important than knowledge, love, of a subject so fascinating and so
magnificent. And that the book may still have the chance of doing this, I
hope to spare no trouble upon it as often as the opportunity presents
itself.[1]
EDINBURGH, _January_ 30, 1907.
[1] In the last (eleventh) re-impression no alterations seemed necessary.
In this, one or two bibliographical matters may call for notice. Every
student of Donne should now consult Professor Grierson's edition of the
_Poems_ (2 vols., Oxford, 1912), and as inquiries have been made as to the
third volume of my own _Caroline Poets_ (see Index), containing Cleveland,
King, Stanley, and some less known authors, I may be permitted to say that
it has been in the press for years, and a large part of it is completed.
But various stoppages, in no case due to neglect, and latterly made
absolute by the war, have prevented its appearance.--BATH, October 8, 1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
FROM TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY TO SPENSER
The starting-point--Tottel's _Miscellany_--Its method and authorship--The
characteristics of its poetry--Wyatt--Surrey--Grimald--Their metres
--The stuff of their poems--_The Mirror for Magistrates_--Sackville
--His contributions and their characteristics--Remarks on the formal
criticism of poetry--Gascoigne--Churchyard--Tusser--Turberville--
Googe--The translators--Classical metres--Stanyhurst--Other
miscellanies Pages 1-27
CHAPTER II
EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE
Outlines of Early Elizabethan Prose--Its origins--Cheke and his
contemporaries--Ascham--His style--Miscellaneous writers--Critics--
Webbe--Puttenham--Lyly--_Euphues_ and Euphuism--Sidney--His style and
critical principles--Hooker--Greville--Knolles--Mulcaster 28-49
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD
Divisions of Elizabethan Drama--Its general character--Origins--_Ralph_
_Roister Doister_--_Gammer Gurton's Needle_--_Gorboduc_--The Senecan
Drama--Other early plays--The "university wits"--Their lives and
characters--Lyly (dramas)--The Marlowe group--Peele--Greene--Kyd--
Marlowe--The actor playwrights 50-81
CHAPTER IV
"THE FAERIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP
Spenser--His life and the order of his works--_The Shepherd's Calendar_
--The minor poems--_The Faerie Queene_--Its scheme--The Spenserian
stanza--Spenser's language--His general poetical qualities--
Comparison with other English poets--His peculiar charm--The
Sonneteers--Fulke Greville--Sidney--Watson--Barnes--Giles Fletcher
the elder--Lodge--_Avisa_--Percy--_Zepheria_--Constable--Daniel--
Drayton--_Alcilia_--Griffin--Lynch--Smith--Barnfield--Southwell--The
song and madrigal writers--Campion--Raleigh--Dyer--Oxford, etc.--
Gifford--Howell, Grove, and others--The historians--Warner--The
larger poetical works of Daniel and Drayton--The satirists--Lodge--
Donne--The poems of Donne generally--Hall--Marston--Guilpin--Tourneur
82-156
CHAPTER V
THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE
Difficulty of writing about Shakespere--His life--His reputation in
England and its history--Divisions of his work--The Poems--The
Sonnets--The Plays--Characteristics of Shakespere--Never unnatural--
His attitude to morality--His humour--Universality of his range--
Comments on him--His manner of working--His variety--Final remarks--
Dramatists to be grouped with Shakespere--Ben Jonson--Chapman--
Marston--Dekker 157-206
CHAPTER VI
LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE
Bacon--Raleigh--The Authorised Version--Jonson and Daniel as
prose-writers--Hakluyt--The Pamphleteers--Greene--Lodge--Harvey--Nash
--Dekker--Breton--The Martin Marprelate Controversy--Account of it,
with specimens of the chief tracts 207-252
CHAPTER VII
THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD
Characteristics--Beaumont and Fletcher--Middleton--Webster--Heywood--
Tourneur--Day 253-288
CHAPTER VIII
THE SCHOOL OF SPENSER AND THE TRIBE OF BEN
Sylvester--Davies of Hereford--Sir John Davies--Giles and Phineas
Fletcher--William Browne--Wither--Drummond--Stirling--Minor Jacobean
poets--Songs from the dramatists 289-314
CHAPTER IX
MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES
The quintet--Milton's life--His character--His periods of literary
production--First Period, the minor poems--The special excellences of
_Comus_--_Lycidas_--Second Period, the pamphlets--Their merits and
defects--Milton's prose style--Third Period, the larger poems--
Milton's blank verse--His origins--His comparative position--Jeremy
Taylor's life--His principal works--His style--Characteristics of his
thought and manner--Sir Thomas Browne--His life, works, and editions
--His literary manner--Characteristics of his style and vocabulary--
His Latinising--Remarkable adjustment of his thought and expression--
Clarendon--His life--Great merits of his _History_--Faults of his
style--Hobbes--His life and works--Extraordinary strength and
clearness of his style 315-353
CHAPTER X
CAROLINE POETRY
Herrick--Carew--Crashaw--Divisions of Minor Caroline poetry--Miscellanies
--George Herbert--Sandys--Vaughan--Lovelace and Suckling--Montrose--
Quarles--More--Beaumont--Habington--Chalkhill--Marmion--Kynaston--
Chamberlayne--Benlowes--Stanley--John Hall--Patrick Carey--Cleveland
--Corbet--Cartwright, Sherburne, and Brome--Cotton--The general
characteristics of Caroline poetry--A defence of the Caroline poets
354-393
CHAPTER XI
THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD
Weakening of dramatic strength--Massinger--Ford--Shirley--Randolph--Brome
--Cokain--Glapthorne--Davenant--Suckling--Minor and anonymous plays
of the Fourth and other Periods--The Shakesperian Apocrypha 394-427
CHAPTER XII
MINOR CAROLINE PROSE
Burton--Fuller--Lord Herbert of Cherbury--Izaak Walton--Howell--Earle--
Felltham--The rest 428-444
CONCLUSION 445
CHAPTER I
FROM TOTTEL'S "MISCELLANY" TO SPENSER
In a work like the present, forming part of a larger whole and preceded by
another part, the writer has the advantage of being almost wholly free from
a difficulty which often presses on historians of a limited and definite
period, whether of literary or of any other history. That difficulty lies
in the discussion and decision of the question of origins--in the allotment
of sufficient, and not more than sufficient, space to a preliminary
recapitulation of the causes and circumstances of the actual events to be
related. Here there is no need for any but the very briefest references of
the kind to connect the present volume with its forerunner, or rather to
indicate the connection of the two.
There has been little difference of opinion as to the long dead-season of
English poetry, broken chiefly, if not wholly, by poets Scottish rather
than English, which lasted through almost the whole of the fifteenth and
the first half of the sixteenth centuries. There has also been little
difference in regarding the remarkable work (known as Tottel's
_Miscellany_, but more properly called _Songs and Sonnets, written by the
Right Honourable Lord Henry Howard, late Earl of Surrey, and other_) which
was published by Richard Tottel in 1557, and which went through two
editions in the summer of that year, as marking the dawn of the new
period. The book is, indeed, remarkable in many ways. The first thing,
probably, which strikes the modern reader about it is the fact that great
part of its contents is anonymous and only conjecturally to be attributed,
while as to the part which is more certainly known to be the work of
several authors, most of those authors were either dead or had written long
before. Mr. Arber's remarks in his introduction (which, though I have
rather an objection to putting mere citations before the public, I am glad
here to quote as a testimony in the forefront of this book to the excellent
deserts of one who by himself has done as much as any living man to
facilitate the study of Elizabethan literature) are entirely to the
point--how entirely to the point only students of foreign as well as of
English literature know. "The poets of that age," says Mr. Arber, "wrote
for their own delectation and for that of their friends, and not for the
general public. They generally had the greatest aversion to their works
appearing in print." This aversion, which continued in France till the end
of the seventeenth century, if not later, had been somewhat broken down in
England by the middle of the sixteenth, though vestiges of it long
survived, and in the form of a reluctance to be known to write for money,
may be found even within the confines of the nineteenth. The humbler means
and lesser public of the English booksellers have saved English literature
from the bewildering multitude of pirated editions, printed from private
and not always faithful manuscript copies, which were for so long the
despair of the editors of many French classics. But the manuscript copies
themselves survive to a certain extent, and in the more sumptuous and
elaborate editions of our poets (such as, for instance, Dr. Grosart's
_Donne_) what they have yielded may be studied with some interest.
Moreover, they have occasionally preserved for us work nowhere else to be
obtained, as, for instance, in the remarkable folio which has supplied Mr.
Bullen with so much of his invaluable collection of Old Plays. At the early
period of Tottel's _Miscellany_ it would appear that the very idea of
publication in print had hardly occurred to many writers' minds. When the
book appeared, both its main contributors, Surrey and Wyatt, had been long
dead, as well as others (Sir Francis Bryan and Anne Boleyn's unlucky
brother, George Lord Rochford) who are supposed to be represented. The
short Printer's Address to the Reader gives absolutely no intelligence as
to the circumstances of the publication, the person responsible for the
editing, or the authority which the editor and printer may have had for
their inclusion of different authors' work. It is only a theory, though a
sufficiently plausible one, that the editor was Nicholas Grimald, chaplain
to Bishop Thirlby of Ely, a Cambridge man who some ten years before had
been incorporated at Oxford and had been elected to a Fellowship at Merton
College. In Grimald's or Grimoald's connection with the book there was
certainly something peculiar, for the first edition contains forty poems
contributed by him and signed with his name, while in the second the full
name is replaced by "N. G.," and a considerable number of his poems give
way to others. More than one construction might, no doubt, be placed on
this curious fact; but hardly any construction can be placed on it which
does not in some way connect Grimald with the publication. It may be added
that, while his, Surrey's, and Wyatt's contributions are substantive and
known--the numbers of separate poems contributed being respectively forty
for Surrey, the same for Grimald, and ninety-six for Wyatt--no less than
one hundred and thirty-four poems, reckoning the contents of the first and
second editions together, are attributed to "other" or "uncertain" authors.
And of these, though it is pretty positively known that certain writers did
contribute to the book, only four poems have been even conjecturally traced
to particular authors. The most interesting of these by far is the poem
attributed, with that which immediately precedes it, to Lord Vaux, and
containing the verses "For age with stealing steps," known to every one
from the gravedigger in _Hamlet_. Nor is this the only connection of
Tottel's _Miscellany_ with Shakespere, for there is no reasonable doubt
that the "Book of Songs and Sonnets," to the absence of which Slender so
pathetically refers in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, is Tottel's, which, as
the first to use the title, long retained it by right of precedence.
Indeed, one of its authors, Churchyard, who, though not in his first youth
at its appearance, survived into the reign of James, quotes it as such, and
so does Drayton even later. No sonnets had been seen in England before, nor
was the whole style of the verse which it contained less novel than this
particular form.
As is the case with many if not most of the authors of our period, a rather
unnecessary amount of ink has been spilt on questions very distantly
connected with the question of the absolute and relative merit of Surrey
and Wyatt in English poetry. In particular, the influence of the one poet
on the other, and the consequent degree of originality to be assigned to
each, have been much discussed. A very few dates and facts will supply most
of the information necessary to enable the reader to decide this and other
questions for himself. Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of Sir Henry Wyatt of
Allington, Kent, was born in 1503, entered St. John's College, Cambridge,
in 1515, became a favourite of Henry VIII., received important diplomatic
appointments, and died in 1542. Lord Henry Howard was born (as is supposed)
in 1517, and became Earl of Surrey by courtesy (he was not, the account of
his judicial murder says, a lord of Parliament) at eight years old. Very
little is really known of his life, and his love for "Geraldine" was made
the basis of a series of fictions by Nash half a century after his death.
He cannot have been more than thirty when, in the Reign of Terror towards
the close of Henry VIII.'s life, he was arrested on frivolous charges, the
gravest being the assumption of the royal arms, found guilty of treason,
and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19th January 1547. Thus it will be seen that
Wyatt was at Cambridge before Surrey was born, and died five years before
him; to which it need only be added that Surrey has an epitaph on Wyatt
which clearly expresses the relation of disciple to master. Yet despite
this relation and the community of influences which acted on both, their
characteristics are markedly different, and each is of the greatest
importance in English poetical history.
In order to appreciate exactly what this importance is we must remember in
what state Wyatt and Surrey found the art which they practised and in which
they made a new start. Speaking roughly but with sufficient accuracy for
the purpose, that state is typically exhibited in two writers, Hawes and
Skelton. The former represents the last phase of the Chaucerian school,
weakened not merely by the absence of men of great talent during more than
a century, but by the continual imitation during that period of weaker and
ever weaker French models--the last faint echoes of the _Roman de la Rose_
and the first extravagances of the _Rhetoriqueurs_. Skelton, on the other
hand, with all his vigour, represents the English tendency to prosaic
doggerel. Whether Wyatt and his younger companion deliberately had recourse
to Italian example in order to avoid these two dangers it would be
impossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and the
result is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especially
Wyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither had
any theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays the
completest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber,"
"banner," and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), but
making a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth," not on the penultimates, but
on the mere "eth." In the following poems even worse liberties are found,
and the strange turns and twists which the poet gives to his decasyllables
suggest either a total want of ear or such a study in foreign languages
that the student had actually forgotten the intonation and cadences of his
own tongue. So stumbling and knock-kneed is his verse that any one who
remembers the admirable versification of Chaucer may now and then be
inclined to think that Wyatt had much better have left his innovations
alone. But this petulance is soon rebuked by the appearance of such a
sonnet as this:--
(_The lover having dreamed enjoying of his love complaineth that the_
_dream is not either longer or truer._)
"Unstable dream, according to the place
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.
By tasted sweetness, make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case
Thou brought'st not her into these tossing seas
But mad'st my sprite to live, my care to increase,[2]
My body in tempest her delight to embrace.
The body dead, the sprite had his desire:
Painless was th' one, the other in delight.
Why then, alas! did it not keep it right,
But thus return to leap into the fire?
And where it was at wish, could not remain?
Such mocks of dreams do turn to deadly pain."
[2] In original "tencrease," and below "timbrace." This substitution of
elision for slur or hiatus (found in Chaucerian MSS.) passed later into the
t' and th' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Wyatt's awkwardness is not limited to the decasyllable, but some of his
short poems in short lines recover rhythmical grace very remarkably, and
set a great example.
Surrey is a far superior metrist. Neither in his sonnets, nor in his
various stanzas composed of heroics, nor in what may be called his doggerel
metres--the fatally fluent Alexandrines, fourteeners, and admixtures of
both, which dominated English poetry from his time to Spenser's, and were
never quite rejected during the Elizabethan period--do we find evidence of
the want of ear, or the want of command of language, which makes Wyatt's
versification frequently disgusting. Surrey has even no small mastery of
what may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence in
successive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a mere
reduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the _AEneid_
(not published in Tottel's _Miscellany_) he has the great honour of being
the originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a bad
pattern. The following sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, and
blank verse extract, may be useful:--
(_Complaint that his lady after she knew of his love kept her face_
_alway hidden from him._)
"I never saw my lady lay apart
Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat,
Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great;
Which other fancies driveth from my heart,
That to myself I do the thought reserve,
The which unwares did wound my woeful breast.
But on her face mine eyes mought never rest
Yet, since she knew I did her love, and serve
Her golden tresses clad alway with black,
Her smiling looks that hid[es] thus evermore
And that restrains which I desire so sore.
So doth this cornet govern me, alack!
In summer sun, in winter's breath, a frost
Whereby the lights of her fair looks I lost."[3]
[3] As printed exactly in both first and second editions this sonnet is
evidently corrupt, and the variations between the two are additional
evidence of this. I have ventured to change "hid" to "hides" in line 10,
and to alter the punctuation in line 13. If the reader takes "that" in line
5 as = "so that," "that" in line 10 as = "which" (_i.e._ "black"), and
"that" in line 11 with "which," he will now, I think, find it intelligible.
Line 13 is usually printed:
"In summer, sun: in winter's breath, a frost."
Now no one would compare a black silk hood to the sun, and a reference to
line 2 will show the real meaning. The hood is a frost which lasts through
summer and winter alike.
(_Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea._)
"Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile,
Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me a while.
And such as by their lords do set but little price,
Let them sit still: it skills them not what chance come on the dice.
But ye whom love hath bound by order of desire,
To love your lords whose good deserts none other would require,
Come ye yet once again and set your foot by mine,
Whose woeful plight and sorrows great, no tongue can well define."[4]
[4] In reading these combinations it must be remembered that there is
always a strong caesura in the midst of the first and Alexandrine line. It
is the Alexandrine which Mr. Browning has imitated in _Fifine_, not that of
Drayton, or of the various practitioners of the Spenserian stanza from
Spenser himself downwards.
"It was the(n)[5] night; the sound and quiet sleep
Had through the earth the weary bodies caught,
The woods, the raging seas, were fallen to rest,
When that the stars had half their course declined.
The fields whist: beasts and fowls of divers hue,
And what so that in the broad lakes remained,
Or yet among the bushy thicks[6] of briar,
Laid down to sleep by silence of the night,
'Gan swage their cares, mindless of travails past.
Not so the spirit of this Phenician.
Unhappy she that on no sleep could chance,
Nor yet night's rest enter in eye or breast.
Her cares redouble: love doth rise and rage again,[7]
And overflows with swelling storms of wrath."
[5] In these extracts () signifies that something found in text seems
better away; [] that something wanting in text has been conjecturally
supplied.
[6] Thickets.
[7] This Alexandrine is not common, and is probably a mere oversight.
The "other" or "uncertain" authors, though interesting enough for purposes
of literary comparison, are very inferior to Wyatt and Surrey. Grimald, the
supposed editor, though his verse must not, of course, be judged with
reference to a more advanced state of things than his own, is but a
journeyman verse-smith.
"Sith, Blackwood, you have mind to take a wife,
I pray you tell wherefore you like that life,"
is a kind of foretaste of Crabbe in its bland ignoring of the formal graces
of poetry. He acquits himself tolerably in the combinations of Alexandrines
and fourteeners noticed above (the "poulter's measure," as Gascoigne was to
call it later), nor does he ever fall into the worst kind of jog-trot. His
epitaphs and elegies are his best work, and the best of them is that on his
mother. Very much the same may be said of the strictly miscellaneous part
of the _Miscellany_. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less
ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of
Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did
love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall
the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the
characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently
uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one
side, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or in
various combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain of
alternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet; while
between them various stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to be
ranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as English
poetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almost
indigenous "eights and sixes" into fourteener lines and into alternate
fourteeners and Alexandrines, seems to have commended itself even more to
contemporary taste, and, as we have seen and shall see, it was eagerly
followed for more than half a century. But it was not destined to succeed.
These long lines, unless very sparingly used, or with the ground-foot
changed from the iambus to the anapaest or the trochee, are not in keeping
with the genius of English poetry, as even the great examples of Chapman's
_Homer_ and the _Polyolbion_ may be said to have shown once for all. In the
hands, moreover, of the poets of this particular time, whether they were
printed at length or cut up into eights and sixes, they had an almost
irresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble which is
inexpressibly monotonous. Even when the spur of a really poetical
inspiration excites this amble into something more fiery (the best example
existing is probably Southwell's wonderful "Burning Babe"), the sensitive
ear feels that there is constant danger of a relapse, and at the worst the
thing becomes mere doggerel. Yet for about a quarter of a century these
overgrown lines held the field in verse and drama alike, and the
encouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefits
which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the _Miscellany_
conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in
the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above all, the
sonnet.
It remains to say something of the matter as distinguished from the form of
this poetry, and for once the form is of hardly superior importance to the
matter. It is a question of some interest, though unfortunately one wholly
incapable of solution, whether the change in the character of poetical
thought and theme which Wyatt and Surrey wrought was accidental, and
consequent merely on their choice of models, and especially of Petrarch, or
essential and deliberate. If it was accidental, there is no greater
accident in the history of literature. The absence of the personal note in
mediaeval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been more
marked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey English poetry became at a
bound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most
"introspective" in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, but
its convention had been a convention of impersonality. It now became
exactly the reverse. The lover sang less his joys than his sorrows, and he
tried to express those sorrows and their effect on him in the most personal
way he could. Although allegory still retained a strong hold on the
national taste, and was yet to receive its greatest poetical expression in
_The Faerie Queene_, it was allegory of quite a different kind from that
which in the _Roman de la Rose_ had taken Europe captive, and had since
dominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in the
department of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled before
the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a
common form--a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost
language--disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the
following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform
conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear his
rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinite
diversity of circumstance and feeling which the life of the actual man
affords, instead of reducing everything to the moods and forms of an
already generalised and allegorised experience. With the new theme to
handle and the new forms ready as tools for the handler, with the general
ferment of European spirits, it might readily have been supposed that a
remarkable out-turn of work would be the certain and immediate result.
The result in fact may have been certain but it was not immediate, being
delayed for nearly a quarter of a century; and the next remarkable piece of
work done in English poetry after Tottel's _Miscellany_--a piece of work of
greater actual poetical merit than anything in that _Miscellany_
itself--was in the old forms, and showed little if any influence of the new
poetical learning. This was the famous _Mirror for Magistrates_, or rather
that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. _The
Mirror_ as a whole has bibliographical and prosodic rather than literary
interest. It was certainly planned as early as 1555 by way of a supplement
to Lydgate's translation of Boccaccio's _Fall of Princes_. It was at first
edited by a certain William Baldwin, and for nearly half a century it
received additions and alterations from various respectable hacks of
letters; but the "Induction" and the "Complaint of Buckingham" which
Sackville furnished to it in 1559, though they were not published till four
years later, completely outweigh all the rest in value. To my own fancy the
fact that Sackville was (in what proportion is disputed) also author of
_Gorboduc_ (see Chapter III.) adds but little to its interest. His
contributions to _The Mirror for Magistrates_ contain the best poetry
written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser, and are most
certainly the originals or at least the models of some of Spenser's finest
work. He has had but faint praise of late years. According to the late
Professor Minto, he "affords abundant traces of the influence of Wyatt and
Surrey." I do not know what the traces are, and I should say myself that
few contemporary or nearly contemporary efforts are more distinct. Dean
Church says that we see in him a faint anticipation of Spenser. My estimate
of Spenser, as I hope to show, is not below that of any living critic; but
considerations of bulk being allowed, and it being fully granted that
Sackville had nothing like Spenser's magnificent range, I cannot see any
"faintness" in the case. If the "Induction" had not been written it is at
least possible that the "Cave of Despair" would never have enriched English
poetry.
Thomas Sackville was born at Buckhurst in Sussex, in the year 1536, of a
family which was of the most ancient extraction and the most honourable
standing. He was educated at Oxford, at the now extinct Hart Hall, whence,
according to a practice as common then as it is uncommon now (except in the
cases of royal princes and a few persons of difficult and inconstant
taste), he moved to Cambridge. Then he entered the Inner Temple, married
early, travelled, became noted in literature, was made Lord Buckhurst at
the age of thirty-one, was for many years one of Elizabeth's chief
councillors and officers, was promoted to the Earldom of Dorset at the
accession of James I., and died, it is said, at the Council table on the
19th of April 1608.
We shall deal with _Gorboduc_ hereafter: the two contributions to _The
Mirror for Magistrates_ concern us here. And I have little hesitation in
saying that no more astonishing contribution to English poetry, when the
due reservations of that historical criticism which is the life of all
criticism are made, is to be found anywhere. The bulk is not great: twelve
or fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new,
being merely the seven-line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. The
arrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegorical
presentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholy
narrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value of
the whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formal
and the material, are represented with a singular equality of development.
There is nothing here of Wyatt's floundering prosody, nothing of the
well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his
pupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse are perfect, the imagery
fresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it is
compared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville must
have been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleve to Hawes.
Even the general plan of the poem--the weakest part of nearly all poems of
this time--is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry that
Sackville's taste, or his other occupations, did not permit him to carry
out the whole scheme on his own account. The "Induction," in which the
author is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the
"Complaint of Buckingham," have a depth and fulness of poetical sound and
sense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, or
forwards nearly five and twenty. Take, for instance, these stanzas:--
"Thence come we to the horror and the hell,
The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign
Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell,
The wide waste places, and the hugy plain,
The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain,
The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan;
Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan.
"Here puled the babes, and here the maids unwed
With folded hands their sorry chance bewailed,
Here wept the guiltless slain, and lovers dead,
That slew themselves when nothing else availed;
A thousand sorts of sorrows here, that wailed
With sighs and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfere
That oh, alas! it was a hell to hear.
* * * * *
"_Lo here_, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown,
That whilom sat on top of fortune's wheel,
Now laid full low; like wretches whirled down,
Ev'n with one frown, that stayed but with a smile;
And now behold the thing that thou, erewhile,
Saw only in thought: and what thou now shalt hear,
Recount the same to kesar, king, and peer."[8]
[8] The precedent descriptions of Sorrow herself, of Misery, and of Old
Age, are even finer than the above, which, however, I have preferred for
three reasons. First, it has been less often quoted; secondly, its subject
is a kind of commonplace, and, therefore, shows the poet's strength of
handling; thirdly, because of the singular and characteristic majesty of
the opening lines.
It is perhaps well, in an early passage of a book which will have much to
do with the criticism of poetry, to dwell a little on what seems to the
critic to be the root of that matter. In the first place, I must entirely
differ with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosody
for English verse under the head of "beats" or "accents" or something of
that sort. _Every English metre since Chaucer at least can be scanned,
within the proper limits, according to the strictest rules of classical
prosody: and while all good English metre comes out scatheless from the
application of those rules, nothing exhibits the badness of bad English
metre so well as that application._ It is, alongside of their great merits,
the distinguishing fault of Wyatt eminently, of Surrey to a less degree,
and of all the new school up to Spenser more or less, that they neglect the
quantity test too freely; it is the merit of Sackville that, holding on in
this respect to the good school of Chaucer, he observes it. You will find
no "jawbreakers" in Sackville, no attempts to adjust English words on a
Procrustean bed of independent quantification. He has not indeed the
manifold music of Spenser--it would be unreasonable to expect that he
should have it. But his stanzas, as the foregoing examples will show, are
of remarkable melody, and they have about them a command, a completeness of
accomplishment within the writer's intentions, which is very noteworthy in
so young a man. The extraordinary richness and stateliness of the measure
has escaped no critic. There is indeed a certain one-sidedness about it,
and a devil's advocate might urge that a long poem couched in verse (let
alone the subject) of such unbroken gloom would be intolerable. But
Sackville did not write a long poem, and his complete command within his
limits of the effect at which he evidently aimed is most remarkable.
The second thing to note about the poem is the extraordinary freshness and
truth of its imagery. From a young poet we always expect second-hand
presentations of nature, and in Sackville's day second-hand presentation of
nature had been elevated to the rank of a science. Here the new
school--Surrey, Wyatt, and their followers--even if he had studied them,
could have given him little or no help, for great as are the merits of
Tottel's _Miscellany_, no one would go to it for representations of nature.
Among his predecessors in his own style he had to go back to Chaucer
(putting the Scotch school out of the question) before he could find
anything original. Yet it may be questioned whether the sketches of
external scenery in these brief essays of his, or the embodiments of
internal thought in the pictures of Sorrow and the other allegorical
wights, are most striking. It is perfectly clear that Thomas Sackville had,
in the first place, a poetical eye to see, within as well as without, the
objects of poetical presentment; in the second place, a poetical vocabulary
in which to clothe the results of his seeing; and in the third place, a
poetical ear by aid of which to arrange his language in the musical
co-ordination necessary to poetry. Wyatt had been too much to seek in the
last; Surrey had not been very obviously furnished with the first; and all
three were not to be possessed by any one else till Edmund Spenser arose to
put Sackville's lessons in practice on a wider scale, and with a less
monotonous lyre. It is possible that Sackville's claims in drama may have
been exaggerated--they have of late years rather been undervalued: but his
claims in poetry proper can only be overlooked by those who decline to
consider the most important part of poetry. In the subject of even his part
of _The Mirror_ there is nothing new: there is only a following of Chaucer,
and Gower, and Occleve, and Lydgate, and Hawes, and many others. But in the
handling there is one novelty which makes all others of no effect or
interest. It is the novelty of a new poetry.
It has already been remarked that these two important books were not
immediately followed by any others in poetry corresponding to their
importance. The poetry of the first half of Elizabeth's reign is as
mediocre as the poetry of the last half of her reign is magnificent.
Although it had taken some hints from Wyatt and Surrey it had not taken the
best; and the inexplicable devotion of most of the versifiers of the time
to the doggerel metres already referred to seems to have prevented them
from cultivating anything better. Yet the pains which were spent upon
translation during this time were considerable, and undoubtedly had much to
do with strengthening and improving the language. The formal part of poetry
became for the first time a subject of study resulting in the
_Instructions_ of Gascoigne, and in the noteworthy critical works which
will be mentioned in the next chapter; while the popularity of poetical
miscellanies showed the audience that existed for verse. The translators
and the miscellanists will each call for some brief notice; but first it is
necessary to mention some individual, and in their way, original writers
who, though not possessing merit at all equal to that of Wyatt, Surrey, and
Sackville, yet deserve to be singled from the crowd. These are Gascoigne,
Churchyard, Turberville, Googe, and Tusser.
The poetaster and literary hack, Whetstone, who wrote a poetical memoir of
George Gascoigne after his death, entitles it a remembrance of "the well
employed life and godly end" of his hero. It is not necessary to dispute
that Gascoigne's end was godly; but except for the fact that he was for
some years a diligent and not unmeritorious writer, it is not so certain
that his life was well employed. At any rate he does not seem to have
thought so himself. The date of his birth has been put as early as 1525 and
as late as 1536: he certainly died in 1577. His father, a knight of good
family and estate in Essex, disinherited him; but he was educated at
Cambridge, if not at both universities, was twice elected to Parliament,
travelled and fought abroad, and took part in the famous festival at
Kenilworth. His work is, as has been said, considerable, and is remarkable
for the number of first attempts in English which it contains. It has at
least been claimed for him (though careful students of literary history
know that these attributions are always rather hazardous) that he wrote the
first English prose comedy (_The Supposes_, a version of Ariosto), the
first regular verse satire (_The Steel Glass_), the first prose tale (a
version from Bandello), the first translation from Greek tragedy
(_Jocasta_), and the first critical essay (the above-mentioned _Notes of
Instruction_). Most of these things, it will be seen, were merely
adaptations of foreign originals; but they certainly make up a remarkable
budget for one man. In addition to them, and to a good number of shorter
and miscellaneous poems, must be mentioned the _Glass of Government_ (a
kind of morality or serious comedy, moulded, it would seem, on German
originals), and the rather prettily, if fantastically termed _Flowers,
Herbs, and Weeds_. Gascoigne has a very fair command of metre: he is not a
great sinner in the childish alliteration which, surviving from the older
English poetry, helps to convert so much of his contemporaries' work into
doggerel. The pretty "Lullaby of a Lover," and "Gascoigne's Good Morrow"
may be mentioned, and part of one of them may be quoted, as a fair specimen
of his work, which is always tolerable if never first-rate.
"Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child;
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
"First lullaby, my youthful years.
It is now time to go to bed,
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the hav'n within my head:
With lullaby then, youth, be still,
With lullaby content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep and so beguile thy mind.
"Next lullaby, my gazing eyes,
Which wanton were to glance apace,
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby then wink awhile,
With lullaby your looks beguile;
Let no fair face, nor beauty bright,
Entice you oft with vain delight.
"And lullaby, my wanton will,
Let reason(s) rule now rein thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought:
With lullaby now take thine ease,
With lullaby thy doubts appease,
For trust to this, if thou be still
My body shall obey thy will."
Thomas Churchyard was an inferior sort of Gascoigne, who led a much longer
if less eventful life. He was about the Court for the greater part of the
century, and had a habit of calling his little books, which were numerous,
and written both in verse and prose, by alliterative titles playing on his
own name, such as _Churchyard's Chips_, _Churchyard's Choice_, and so
forth. He was a person of no great literary power, and chiefly noteworthy
because of his long life after contributing to Tottel's _Miscellany_, which
makes him a link between the old literature and the new.
The literary interests and tentative character of the time, together with
its absence of original genius, and the constant symptoms of not having
"found its way," are also very noteworthy in George Turberville and Barnabe
Googe, who were friends and verse writers of not dissimilar character.
Turberville, of whom not much is known, was a Dorsetshire man of good
family, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford. His birth and death
dates are both extremely uncertain. Besides a book on Falconry and numerous
translations (to which, like all the men of his school and day, he was much
addicted), he wrote a good many occasional poems, trying even blank verse.
Barnabe Googe, a Lincolnshire man, and a member of both universities,
appears to have been born in 1540, was employed in Ireland, and died in
1594. He was kin to the Cecils, and Mr. Arber has recovered some rather
interesting details about his love affairs, in which he was assisted by
Lord Burghley. He, too, was an indefatigable translator, and wrote some
original poems. Both poets affected the combination of Alexandrine and
fourteener (split up or not, as the printer chose, into six, six, eight,
six), the popularity of which has been noted, and both succumbed too often
to its capacities of doggerel. Turberville's best work is the following
song in a pretty metre well kept up:--
"The green that you did wish me wear
Aye for your love,
And on my helm a branch to bear
Not to remove,
Was ever you to have in mind
Whom Cupid hath my feire assigned.
"As I in this have done your will
And mind to do,
So I request you to fulfil
My fancy too;
A green and loving heart to have,
And this is all that I do crave.
"For if your flowering heart should change
His colour green,
Or you at length a lady strange
Of me be seen,
Then will my branch against his use
His colour change for your refuse.[9]
"As winter's force cannot deface
This branch his hue,
So let no change of love disgrace
Your friendship true;
You were mine own, and so be still,
So shall we live and love our fill.
"Then I may think myself to be
Well recompensed,
For wearing of the tree that is
So well defensed
Against all weather that doth fall
When wayward winter spits his gall.
"And when we meet, to try me true,
Look on my head,
And I will crave an oath of you
Whe'r[10] Faith be fled;
So shall we both answered be,
Both I of you, and you of me."
[9] Refusal.
[10] Short for "whether."
The most considerable and the most interesting part of Googe's work is a
set of eight eclogues which may not have been without influence on _The
Shepherd's Calendar_, and a poem of some length entitled _Cupido
Conquered_, which Spenser may also have seen. Googe has more sustained
power than Turberville, but is much inferior to him in command of metre and
in lyrical swing. In him, or at least in his printer, the mania for cutting
up long verses reaches its height, and his very decasyllables are found
arranged in the strange fashion of four and six as thus:--
"Good aged Bale:
That with thy hoary hairs
Dost still persist
To turn the painful book,
O happy man,
That hast obtained such years,
And leav'st not yet
On papers pale to look.
Give over now
To beat thy wearied brain,
And rest thy pen,
That long hath laboured sore."
Thomas Tusser (1524?-1580) has often been regarded as merely a writer of
doggerel, which is assuredly not lacking in his _Hundred_ (later _Five
Hundred_) _Points of Husbandry_ (1557-1573). But he has some piquancy of
phrase, and is particularly noticeable for the variety, and to a certain
extent the accomplishment, of his prosodic experiments--a point of much
importance for the time.
To these five, of whom some substantive notice has been given, many shadowy
names might be added if the catalogue were of any use: such as those of
Kinwelmersh, Whetstone, Phaer, Neville, Blundeston, Edwards, Golding, and
many others. They seem to have been for the most part personally acquainted
with one another; the literary energies of England being almost confined to
the universities and the Inns of Court, so that most of those who devoted
themselves to literature came into contact and formed what is sometimes
called a clique. They were all studiously and rather indiscriminately given
to translation (the body of foreign work, ancient and modern, which was
turned into English during this quarter of a century being very large
indeed), and all or many of them were contributors of commendatory verses
to each other's work and of pieces of different descriptions to the
poetical miscellanies of the time. Of these miscellanies and of the chief
translations from the classics some little notice may be taken because of
the great part which both played in the poetical education of England. It
has been said that almost all the original poets were also translators.
Thus Googe Englished, among other things, the _Zodiacus Vitae_ of Marcellus
Palingenius, the _Regnum Papisticum_ of Kirchmayer, the _Four Books of
Husbandry_ of Conrad Heresbach, and the _Proverbs_ of the Marquis of
Santillana; but some of the translators were not distinguished by any
original work. Thus Jasper Heywood, followed by Neville above mentioned, by
Studley, and others, translated between 1560 and 1580 those tragedies of
Seneca which had such a vast influence on foreign literature and,
fortunately, so small an influence on English. Arthur Golding gave in 1567
a version, by no means destitute of merit, of the _Metamorphoses_ which had
a great influence on English poetry. We have already mentioned Surrey's
blank-verse translation of Virgil. This was followed up, in 1555-60, by
Thomas Phaer, who, like most of the persons mentioned in this paragraph,
used the fourteener, broken up or not, as accident or the necessities of
the printer brought it about.
It was beyond doubt this abundant translation, and perhaps also the
manifest deficiencies of the fourteener thus used, which brought about at
the close of the present period and the beginning of the next the
extraordinary attempt to reproduce classical metres in English verse, which
for a time seduced even Spenser, which was not a little countenanced by
most of the critical writers of the period, which led Gabriel Harvey and
others into such absurdities, and which was scarcely slain even by Daniel's
famous and capital _Defence of Rhyme_. The discussion of this absurd
attempt (for which rules, not now extant, came from Drant of Cambridge) in
the correspondence of Spenser and Harvey, and the sensible fashion in which
Nash laughed at it, are among the best known things in the gossiping
history of English Letters. But the coxcombry of Harvey and the felicitous
impertinence of Nash have sometimes diverted attention from the actual
state of the case. William Webbe (a very sober-minded person with taste
enough to admire the "new poet," as he calls Spenser) makes elaborate
attempts not merely at hexameters, which, though only a curiosity, are a
possible curiosity in English, but at Sapphics which could never (except as
burlesque) be tolerable. Sidney, Spenser, and others gave serious heed to
the scheme of substituting classical metres without rhyme for indigenous
metres with rhyme. And unless the two causes which brought this about are
constantly kept in mind, the reason of it will not be understood. It was
undoubtedly the weakness of contemporary English verse which reinforced the
general Renaissance admiration for the classics; nor must it be forgotten
that Wyatt takes, in vernacular metres and with rhyme, nearly as great
liberties with the intonation and prosody of the language as any of the
classicists in their unlucky hexameters and elegiacs. The majesty and grace
of the learned tongues, contrasting with the poverty of their own language,
impressed, and to a great extent rightly impressed, the early Elizabethans,
so that they naturally enough cast about for any means to improve the one,
and hesitated at any peculiarity which was not found in the other. It was
unpardonable in Milton to sneer at rhyme after the fifty years of
magnificent production which had put English on a level with Greek and
above Latin as a literary instrument. But for Harvey and Spenser, Sidney
and Webbe, with those fifty years still to come, the state of the case was
very different.
The translation mania and the classicising mania together led to the
production of perhaps the most absurd book in all literature--a book which
deserves extended notice here, partly because it has only recently become
accessible to the general reader in its original form, and partly because
it is, though a caricature, yet a very instructive caricature of the
tendencies and literary ideas of the time. This is Richard Stanyhurst's
translation of the first four books of the _AEneid_, first printed at Leyden
in the summer of 1582, and reprinted in London a year later. This wonderful
book (in which the spelling is only less marvellous than the phraseology
and verse) shows more than anything else the active throes which English
literature was undergoing, and though the result was but a false birth it
is none the less interesting.
Stanyhurst was not, as might be hastily imagined, a person of insufficient
culture or insufficient brains. He was an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman,
brother-in-law to Lord Dunsany, and uncle to Archbishop Usher, and though
he was author of the Irish part of Holinshed's _History_, he has always
been regarded by the madder sort of Hibernians as a traitor to the nation.
His father was Recorder of Dublin, and he himself, having been born about
1547, was educated at University College, Oxford, and went thence, if not
to the Inns of Court, at any rate to those of Chancery, and became a
student of Furnival's Inn. He died at Brussels in 1618. Here is an example
of his prose, the latter part of which is profitable for matter as well as
for form:--
"How beyt[11] I haue heere haulf a guesh, that two sorts of
carpers wyl seeme too spurne at this myne enterprise. Thee one
vtterlie ignorant, the oother meanlye letterd. Thee ignorant wyl
imagin, that thee passage was nothing craggye, in as much as M.
Phaere hath broken thee ice before me: Thee meaner clarcks wyl
suppose my trauail in theese heroical verses too carrye no great
difficultie, in that yt lay in my choice too make what word I
would short or long, hauing no English writer beefore mee in this
kind of poetrye with whose squire I should leauel my syllables.
[11] This and the next extract are given _literatim_ to show Stanyhurst's
marvellous spelling.
* * * * *
Haue not theese men made a fayre speake? If they had put in
_Mightye Joue_, and _gods_ in thee plural number, and _Venus_
with _Cupide thee blynd Boy_, al had beene in thee nick, thee
rythme had been of a right stamp. For a few such stiches boch vp
oure newe fashion makers. Prouyded not wythstanding alwayes that
_Artaxerxes_, al be yt hee bee spurgalde, beeing so much gallop,
bee placed in thee dedicatory epistle receauing a cuppe of water
of a swayne, or elles al is not wurth a beane. Good God what a
frye of _wooden rythmours_ dooth swarme in stacioners shops, who
neauer enstructed in any grammar schoole, not atayning too thee
paaringes of thee Latin or Greeke tongue, yeet like blind bayards
rush on forward, fostring theyre vayne conceits wyth such
ouerweening silly follyes, as they reck not too bee condemned of
thee learned for ignorant, so they bee commended of thee ignorant
for learned. Thee reddyest way, therefore, too flap theese
droanes from the sweete senting hiues of Poetrye, is for thee
learned too applye theym selues wholye (yf they be delighted wyth
that veyne) too thee true making of verses in such wise as thee
_Greekes_ and _Latins_, thee fathurs of knowledge, haue doone;
and too leaue too theese doltish coystrels theyre rude rythming
and balducktoom ballads."
Given a person capable of this lingo, given the prevalent mania for English
hexameters, and even what follows may not seem too impossible.
"This sayd, with darcksoom night shade quite clowdye she vannisht.
Grislye faces frouncing, eke against Troy leaged in hatred
Of Saincts soure deities dyd I see.
Then dyd I marck playnely thee castle of Ilion vplayd,
And Troian buyldings quit topsy turvye remooued.
Much lyk on a mountayn thee tree dry wythered oaken
Sliest by the clowne Coridon rusticks with twibbil or hatchet.
Then the tre deepe minced, far chopt dooth terrifye swinckers
With menacing becking thee branches palsye before tyme,
Vntil with sowghing yt grunts, as wounded in hacking.
At length with rounsefal, from stock vntruncked yt harssheth.
* * * * *
Hee rested wylful lyk a wayward obstinat oldgrey.
* * * * *
Theese woords owt showting with her howling the house she replennisht."
There is perhaps no greater evidence of the reverence in which the
ancients were held than that such frantic balderdash as this did not
extinguish it. Yet this was what a man of undoubted talent, of considerable
learning, and of no small acuteness (for Stanyhurst's Preface to this very
translation shows something more than glimmerings on the subject of
classical and English prosody), could produce. It must never be forgotten
that the men of this time were at a hopelessly wrong point of view. It
never occurred to them that English left to itself could equal Greek or
Latin. They simply endeavoured, with the utmost pains and skill, to drag
English up to the same level as these unapproachable languages by forcing
it into the same moulds which Greek and Latin had endured. Properly
speaking we ought not to laugh at them. They were carrying out in
literature what the older books of arithmetic call "The Rule of
False,"--that is to say, they were trying what the English tongue could
_not_ bear. No one was so successful as Stanyhurst in applying this test of
the rack: yet it is fair to say that Harvey and Webbe, nay, Spenser and
Sidney, had practically, though, except in Spenser's case, it would appear
unconsciously, arrived at the same conclusion before. How much we owe to
such adventurers of the impossible few men know except those who have tried
to study literature as a whole.
A few words have to be said in passing as to the miscellanies which played
such an important part in the poetical literature of the day. Tottel and
_The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was, considering its constant
accretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They were
followed by not a few others. The first in date was _The Paradise of Dainty
Devices_ (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not of
genius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was very
popular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a few
scattered exceptions it does not yield much to the historian of English
poetry. Its popularity shows what was expected; its contents show what, at
any rate at the date of its first appearance, was given. It is possible
that the doleful contents of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was
reprinted six times during our present period, and which busied itself
wholly with what magistrates should avoid, and with the sorrowful departing
out of this life of the subjects) may have had a strong effect on Edwards,
though one at least of his contributors, W. Hunnis, was a man of mould. It
was followed in 1578 by _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_,
supposed to have been edited by Roydon and Proctor, which is a still drier
stick. The next miscellany, six years later, _A Handful of Pleasant
Delights_, edited by Clement Robinson, is somewhat better though not much.
It is followed by the _Phoenix Nest_, an interesting collection, by no less
than three miscellanies in 1600, edited by "A. B." and R. Allot, and named
_England's Helicon_, _England's Parnassus_, and _Belvedere_ (the two latter
being rather anthologies of extracts than miscellanies proper), and by
Francis Davison's famous _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602, all which last belong
to a much later date than our present subjects.
To call the general poetical merit of these earlier miscellanies high would
be absurd. But what at once strikes the reader, not merely of them but of
the collections of individual work which accompany them, as so astonishing,
is the level which is occasionally reached. The work is often the work of
persons quite unknown or unimportant in literature as persons. But we
constantly see in it a flash, a symptom of the presence of the true
poetical spirit which it is often impossible to find for years together in
other periods of poetry. For instance, if ever there was a "dull dog" in
verse it was Richard Edwards. Yet in _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_
Edwards's poem with the refrain "The falling out of faithful friends
renewing is of love," is one of the most charming things anywhere to be
found. So is, after many years, the poem attributed to John Wooton in
_England's Helicon_ (the best of the whole set), beginning "Her eyes like
shining lamps," so is the exquisite "Come, little babe" from _The Arbour of
Amorous Devices_, so are dozens and scores more which may be found in their
proper places, and many of them in Mr. Arber's admirable _English Garner_.
The spirit of poetry, rising slowly, was rising surely in the England of
these years: no man knew exactly where it would appear, and the greatest
poets were--for their praises of themselves and their fellows are quite
unconscious and simple--as ignorant as others. The first thirty years of
the reign were occupied with simple education--study of models, efforts in
this or that kind, translation, and the rest. But the right models had been
provided by Wyatt and Surrey's study of the Italians, and by the study of
the classics which all men then pursued; and the original inspiration,
without which the best models are useless, though itself can do little when
the best models are not used, was abundantly present. Few things are more
curious than to compare, let us say, Googe and Spenser. Yet few things are
more certain than that without the study and experiments which Googe
represents Spenser could not have existed. Those who decry the historical
method in criticism ignore this; and ignorance like wisdom is justified of
all her children.