subject to pass in review the throng of miscellaneous poets and poetry
indicated under this group. The reprints of Dr. Grosart and Mr. Arber,
supplemented in a few cases by recourse to the older recoveries of Brydges,
Haslewood, Park, Collier, and others, bring before the student a mass of
brilliant and beautiful matter, often mixed with a good deal of slag and
scoriae, but seldom deficient in the true poetical ore. The mere collections
of madrigals and songs, actually intended for casual performance at a time
when almost every accomplished and well-bred gentleman or lady was expected
to oblige the company, which Mr. Arber's invaluable _English Garner_ and
Mr. Bullen's _Elizabethan Lyrics_ give from the collections edited or
produced by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and
others, represent such a body of verse as probably could not be got
together, with the same origin and circumstances, in any quarter-century of
any nation's history since the foundation of the world. In Campion
especially the lyrical quality is extraordinary. He was long almost
inaccessible, but Mr. Bullen's edition of 1889 has made knowledge of him
easy. His birth-year is unknown, but he died in 1620. He was a Cambridge
man, a member of the Inns of Court, and a physician in good practice. He
has left us a masque; four _Books of Airs_ (1601-17?), in which the gems
given below, and many others, occur; and a sometimes rather unfairly
characterised critical treatise, _Observations on the Art of English
Poesy_, in which he argues against rhyme and for strict quantitative
measures, but on quite different lines from those of the craze of
Stanyhurst and Harvey. Some of his illustrations of his still rather
unnatural fancy (especially "Rose-cheeked Laura," which is now tolerably
familiar in anthologies) are charming, though never so charming as his
rhymed "Airs." The poetry is, indeed, mostly in flashes, and it is not very
often that any song is a complete gem, like the best of the songs from the
dramatists, one or two of which will be given presently for comparison. But
by far the greater number contain and exemplify those numerous
characteristics of poetry, as distinguished from verse, which at one time
of literary history seem naturally to occur--seem indeed to be had for the
gathering by any one who chooses--while at another time they are but
sparingly found in the work of men of real genius, and seem altogether to
escape men of talent, accomplishment, and laborious endeavour. Here are a
few specimens from Peele and others, especially Campion. As it is, an
exceptional amount of the small space possible for such things in this
volume has been given to them, but there is a great temptation to give
more. Lyly's lyrical work, however, is fairly well known, and more than one
collection of "Songs from the Dramatists" has popularised others.
_AE._ "Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
The fairest shepherd on our green,
A love for any lady.
_Par._ Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be:
Thy love is fair for thee alone,
And for no other lady.
_AE._ My love is fair, my love is gay,
As fresh as bin the flowers in May,
And of my love my roundelay
Concludes with Cupid's curse,
They that do change old love for new
Pray gods, they change for worse!
_Ambo, simul._ They that do change, etc., etc.
_AE._ Fair and fair, etc.
_Par._ Fair and fair, etc.
_AE._ My love can pipe, my love can sing,
My love can many a pretty thing,
And of his lovely praises ring
My merry, merry roundelays.
Amen to Cupid's curse,
They that do change, etc."
PEELE.
"His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurned,
But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing:
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen.
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.
"His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,
And lovers' songs be turned to holy psalms;
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, which are old age's alms:
But though from court to cottage he depart,
His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.
"And when he saddest sits in homely cell,
He'll teach his swains this carol for a song:
'Blessed be the hearts that wish my Sovereign well,
Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong.'
Goddess allow this aged man his right,
To be your beadsman now that was your knight."
PEELE.
"Fain would I change that note
To which fond love hath charm'd me,
Long, long to sing by rote
Fancying that that harm'd me:
Yet when this thought doth come,
'Love is the perfect sum
Of all delight!'
I have no other choice
Either for pen or voice
To sing or write.
"O Love, they wrong thee much
That say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy rich fruit is such
As nothing can be sweeter.
Fair house of joy and bliss
Where truest pleasure is,
I do adore thee;
I know thee what thou art.
I serve thee with my heart
And fall before thee.
_Anon. in_ BULLEN.
"Turn all thy thoughts to eyes,
Turn all thy hairs to ears,
Change all thy friends to spies,
And all thy joys to fears:
True love will yet be free
In spite of jealousy.
"Turn darkness into day,
Conjectures into truth,
Believe what th' curious say,
Let age interpret youth:
True love will yet be free
In spite of jealousy.
"Wrest every word and look,
Rack every hidden thought;
Or fish with golden hook,
True love cannot be caught:
For that will still be free
In spite of jealousy."
CAMPION _in_ BULLEN.
"Come, O come, my life's delight!
Let me not in languor pine!
Love loves no delay; thy sight
The more enjoyed, the more divine.
O come, and take from me
The pain of being deprived of thee!
"Thou all sweetness dost enclose
Like a little world of bliss;
Beauty guards thy looks, the rose
In them pure and eternal is:
Come, then, and make thy flight
As swift to me as heavenly light!"
CAMPION.
"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet!
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet!
There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move,
And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love.
But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain,
Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again.
"All that I sang still to her praise did tend,
Still she was first, still she my songs did end;
Yet she my love and music both doth fly,
The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy:
Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight!
It shall suffice that they were breathed and died for her delight."
CAMPION.
"What if a day, or a month, or a year,
Crown thy delights with a thousand sweet contentings!
Cannot a chance of a night or an hour
Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings?
Fortune, Honour, Beauty, Youth, are but blossoms dying,
Wanton Pleasure, doating Love, are but shadows flying.
All our joys are but toys! idle thoughts deceiving:
None have power, of an hour, in their lives bereaving.
"Earth's but a point to the world, and a man
Is but a point to the world's compared centre!
Shall then a point of a point be so vain
As to triumph in a silly point's adventure?
All is hazard that we have, there is nothing biding;
Days of pleasure are like streams through fair meadows gliding.
Weal and woe, time doth go! time is never turning;
Secret fates guide our states, both in mirth and mourning."
CAMPION.
"'Twas I that paid for all things,
'Twas others drank the wine,
I cannot now recall things;
Live but a fool, to pine.
'Twas I that beat the bush,
The bird to others flew;
For she, alas, hath left me.
Falero! lero! loo!
"If ever that Dame Nature
(For this false lover's sake)
Another pleasing creature
Like unto her would make;
Let her remember this,
To make the other true!
For this, alas! hath left me.
Falero! lero! loo!
"No riches now can raise me,
No want makes me despair,
No misery amaze me,
Nor yet for want I care:
I have lost a World itself,
My earthly Heaven, adieu!
Since she, alas! hath left me.
Falero! lero! loo!"
_Anon. in_ ARBER.
Beside these collections, which were in their origin and inception chiefly
musical, and literary, as it were, only by parergon, there are successors
of the earlier Miscellanies in which, as in _England's Helicon_ and the
celebrated _Passionate Pilgrim_, there is some of the most exquisite of our
verse. And, yet again, a crowd of individual writers, of few of whom is
much known, contributed, not in all cases their mites by any means, but
often very respectable sums, to the vast treasury of English poetry. There
is Sir Edward Dyer, the friend of Raleigh and Sidney, who has been
immortalised by the famous "My mind to me a kingdom is," and who wrote
other pieces not much inferior. There is Raleigh, to whom the glorious
preparatory sonnet to _The Faerie Queene_ would sufficiently justify the
ascription of "a vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate," if a very
considerable body of verse (independent of the fragmentary _Cynthia_) did
not justify this many times over, as two brief quotations in addition to
the sonnet will show:--
"Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn: and, passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen,
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from henceforth those graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended; in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And curse the access of that celestial thief."
* * * * *
"Three things there be that prosper all apace,
And flourish while they are asunder far;
But on a day they meet all in a place,
And when they meet they one another mar.
"And they be these--the Wood, the Weed, the Wag:
The Wood is that that makes the gallows tree;
The Weed is that that strings the hangman's bag;
The Wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee.
"Now mark, dear boy--while these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the Wag is wild;
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
"God bless the Child!"
* * * * *
"Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.
"Blood must be my body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given;
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travelleth towards the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains
Where spring the nectar fountains:
There will I kiss
The bowl of bliss;
And drink mine everlasting fill
Upon every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before,
But after it will thirst no more."
There is Lord Oxford, Sidney's enemy (which he might be if he chose), and
apparently a coxcomb (which is less pardonable), but a charming writer of
verse, as in the following:--
"Come hither, shepherd swain!
Sir, what do you require?
I pray thee, shew to me thy name!
My name is Fond Desire.
"When wert thou born, Desire?
In pomp and prime of May.
By whom, sweet boy, wert thou begot?
By fond Conceit, men say.
"Tell me, who was thy nurse
Fresh youth, in sugared joy.
What was thy meat and daily food?
Sad sighs, with great annoy.
"What hadst thou then to drink?
Unfeigned lovers' tears.
What cradle wert thou rocked in?
In hope devoid of fears.
"What lulled thee then asleep?
Sweet speech which likes me best.
Tell me, where is thy dwelling-place?
In gentle hearts I rest.
"What thing doth please thee most?
To gaze on beauty still.
Whom dost thou think to be thy foe?
Disdain of my good will.
"Doth company displease?
Yes, surely, many one.
Where doth desire delight to live?
He loves to live alone.
"Doth either time or age
Bring him unto decay?
No, no! Desire both lives and dies
A thousand times a day.
"Then, fond Desire, farewell!
Thou art no mate for me;
I should be loath, methinks, to dwell
With such a one as thee.
There is, in the less exalted way, the industrious man of all work,
Nicholas Breton, whom we shall speak of more at length among the
pamphleteers, and John Davies of Hereford, no poet certainly, but a most
industrious verse-writer in satiric and other forms. Mass of production,
and in some cases personal interest, gives these a certain standing above
their fellows. But the crowd of those fellows, about many of whom even the
painful industry of the modern commentator has been able to tell us next to
nothing, is almost miraculous when we remember that printing was still
carried on under a rigid censorship by a select body of monopolists, and
that out of London, and in rare cases the university towns, it was
impossible for a minor poet to get into print at all unless he trusted to
the contraband presses of the Continent. In dealing with this crowd of
enthusiastic poetical students it is impossible to mention all, and
invidious to single out some only. The very early and interesting _Posy of
Gillyflowers_ of Humphrey Gifford (1580) exhibits the first stage of our
period, and might almost have been referred to the period before it; the
same humpty-dumpty measure of eights and sixes, and the same vestiges of
rather infantine alliteration being apparent in it, though something of the
fire and variety of the new age of poetry appears beside them, notably in
this most spirited war-song:--
(_For Soldiers._)
"Ye buds of Brutus' land, courageous youths now play your parts,[28]
Unto your tackle stand, abide the brunt with valiant hearts,
For news is carried to and fro, that we must forth to warfare go:
Then muster now in every place, and soldiers are pressed forth apace.
Faint not, spend blood to do your Queen and country good:
Fair words, good pay, will make men cast all care away.
"The time of war is come, prepare your corslet, spear, and shield:
Methinks I hear the drum strike doleful marches to the field.
Tantara, tantara the trumpets sound, which makes our hearts with joy
abound.
The roaring guns are heard afar, and everything announceth war.
Serve God, stand stout; bold courage brings this gear about;
Fear not, forth run: faint heart fair lady never won.
"Ye curious carpet-knights that spend the time in sport and play,
Abroad and see new sights, your country's cause calls you away:
Do not, to make your ladies' game, bring blemish to your worthy name.
Away to field and win renown, with courage beat your enemies down;
Stout hearts gain praise, when dastards sail in slander's seas.
Hap what hap shall, we soon shall die but once for all.
"Alarm! methinks they cry. Be packing mates, begone with speed,
Our foes are very nigh: shame have that man that shrinks at need.
Unto it boldly let us stand, God will give right the upper hand.
Our cause is good we need not doubt: in sign of courage give a shout;
March forth, be strong, good hap will come ere it be long.
Shrink not, fight well, for lusty lads must bear the bell.
"All you that will shun evil must dwell in warfare every day.
The world, the flesh, the devil always do seek our souls' decay.
Strive with these foes with all your might, so shall you fight a
worthy fight.
That conquest dost deserve most praise, whose vice do[th] yield to
virtue's ways.
Beat down foul sin, a worthy crown then shall ye win:
If ye live well, in Heaven with Christ our souls shall dwell."
[28] I print this as in the original, but perhaps the rhythm, which is an
odd one, would be better marked if lines 1 and 2 were divided into sixes
and eights, lines 3 and 4 into eights, and lines 5 and 6 into fours and
eights as the rhyme ends.
Of the same date, or indeed earlier, are the miscellaneous poems of Thomas
Howell, entitled _The Arbour of Amity_, and chiefly of an ethical
character. Less excusable for the uncouthness of his verse is Matthew
Grove, who, writing, or at least publishing, his poems in 1587, should have
learnt something, but apparently had not. It has to be said in excuse of
him that his date and indeed existence are shadowy, even among the shadowy
Elizabethan bards; his editor, in worse doggerel than his own, frankly
confessing that he knew nothing about him, not so much as whether he was
alive or dead. But his work, Howell's, and even part of Gifford's, is
chiefly interesting as giving us in the very sharpest contrast the
differences of the poetry before and after the melodious bursts of which
Spenser, Sidney, and Watson were the first mouthpieces. Except an utter
dunce (which Grove does not seem to have been by any means) no one who had
before him _The Shepherd's Calendar_, or the _Hecatompathia_, or a MS. copy
of _Astrophel and Stella_, could have written as Grove wrote. There are
echoes of this earlier and woodener matter to be found later, but, as a
whole, the passionate love of beauty, the sense--if only a groping
sense--of form, and the desire to follow, and if possible improve upon the
models of melodious verse which the Sidneian school had given, preserved
even poetasters from the lowest depths.
To classify the miscellaneous verse of 1590-1600 (for the second decade is
much richer than the first) under subjects and styles is a laborious and,
at best, an uncertain business. The semi-mythological love-poem, with a
more or less tragic ending, had not a few followers; the collection of
poems of various character in praise of a real or imaginary mistress,
similar in design to the sonnet collections, but either more miscellaneous
in form or less strung together in one long composition, had even more;
while the collection pure and simple, resembling the miscellanies in
absence of special character, but the work of one, not of many writers, was
also plentifully represented. Satirical allegory, epigram, and other kinds,
had numerous examples. But there were two classes of verse which were both
sufficiently interesting in themselves and were cultivated by persons of
sufficient individual repute to deserve separate and detailed mention.
These were the historical poem or history--a kind of companion production
to the chronicle play or chronicle, and a very popular one--which, besides
the names of Warner, Daniel, and Drayton, counted not a few minor adherents
among Elizabethan bards. Such were the already-mentioned Giles Fletcher;
such Fitz-Geoffrey in a remarkable poem on Drake, and Gervase Markham in a
not less noteworthy piece on the last fight of _The Revenge_; such numerous
others, some of whom are hardly remembered, and perhaps hardly deserve to
be. The other, and as a class the more interesting, though nothing actually
produced by its practitioners may be quite equal to the best work of
Drayton and Daniel, was the beginning of English satire. This beginning is
interesting not merely because of the apparent coincidence of instinct
which made four or five writers of great talent simultaneously hit on the
style, so that it is to this day difficult to award exactly the palm of
priority, but also because the result of their studies, in some peculiar
and at first sight rather inexplicable ways, is some of the most
characteristic, if very far from being some of the best, work of the whole
poetical period with which we are now busied. In passing, moreover, from
the group of miscellaneous poets to these two schools, if we lose not a
little of the harmony and lyrical sweetness which characterise the best
work of the Elizabethan singer proper, we gain greatly in bulk and dignity
of work and in intrinsic value. Of at least one of the poets mentioned in
the last paragraph his modern editor--a most enthusiastic and tolerant
godfather of waifs and strays of literature--confesses that he really does
not quite know why he should be reprinted, except that the original is
unique, and that almost every scrap of literature in this period is of some
value, if only for lexicographic purposes. No one would dream of speaking
thus of Drayton or of Daniel, of Lodge, Hall, Donne, or Marston; while even
Warner, the weakest of the names to which we shall proceed to give separate
notice, can be praised without too much allowance. In the latter case,
moreover, if not in the first (for the history-poem, until it was taken up
in a very different spirit at the beginning of this century, never was a
success in England), the matter now to be reviewed, after being in its own
kind neglected for a couple of generations, served as forerunner, if not
exactly as model, to the magnificent satiric work of Dryden, and through
his to that of Pope, Young, Churchill, Cowper, and the rest of the more
accomplished English satirists. The acorn of such an oak cannot be without
interest.
The example of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ is perhaps sufficient to
account for the determination of a certain number of Elizabethan poets
towards English history; especially if we add the stimulating effect of
Holinshed's _Chronicle_, which was published in 1580. The first of the
so-called historians, William Warner, belongs in point of poetical style to
the pre-Spenserian period, and like its other exponents employs the
fourteener; while, unlike some of them, he seems quite free from any
Italian influence in phraseology or poetical manner. Nevertheless _Albion's
England_ is, not merely in bulk but in merit, far ahead of the average work
of our first period, and quite incommensurable with such verse as that of
Grove. It appeared by instalments (1586-1606-1612). Of its author, William
Warner, the old phrase has to be repeated, that next to nothing is known of
him. He was an Oxfordshire man by birth, and an Oxford man by education; he
had something to do with Cary, Lord Hunsdon, became an Attorney of the
Common Pleas, and died at Amwell suddenly in his bed in 1609, being, as it
is guessed rather than known, fifty years old or thereabouts. _Albion's
England_ was seized as contraband, by orders of the Archbishop of
Canterbury--a proceeding for which no one has been able to account (the
suggestion that parts of it are indelicate is, considering the manners of
the time, quite ludicrous), and which may perhaps have been due to some
technical informality. It is thought that he is the author of a translation
of Plautus's _Menaechmi_; he certainly produced in 1585? a prose story, or
rather collection of stories, entitled _Syrinx_, which, however, is
scarcely worth reading. _Albion's England_ is in no danger of incurring
that sentence. In the most easily accessible edition, that of Chalmers's
"Poets," it is spoilt by having the fourteeners divided into eights and
sixes, and it should if possible be read in the original arrangement.
Considering how few persons have written about it, an odd collection of
critical slips might be made. Philips, Milton's nephew, in this case it may
be hoped, not relying on his uncle, calls Warner a "good plain writer of
moral rules and precepts": the fact being that though he sometimes
moralises he is in the main a story-teller, and much more bent on narrative
than on teaching. Meres calls him "a refiner of the English tongue," and
attributes to him "rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments of the pen":
the truth being that he is (as Philips so far correctly says) a singularly
plain, straightforward, and homely writer. Others say that he wrote in
"Alexandrines"--a blunder, and a serious one, which has often been repeated
up to the present day in reference to other writers of the seven-foot
verse. He brings in, according to the taste and knowledge of his time, all
the fabulous accounts of the origins of Britain, and diversifies them with
many romantic and pastoral histories, classical tales, and sometimes mere
_Fabliaux_, down to his own time. The chief of the episodes, the story of
Argentile and Curan, has often, and not undeservedly, met with high praise,
and sometimes in his declamatory parts Warner achieves a really great
success. Probably, however, what commended his poem most to the taste of
the day was its promiscuous admixture of things grave and gay--a mixture
which was always much to the taste of Elizabeth's men, and the popularity
of which produced and fostered many things, from the matchless tragi-comedy
of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ to the singularly formless pamphlets of which we
shall speak hereafter. The main interest of Warner is his insensibility to
the new influences which Spenser and Sidney directed, and which are found
producing their full effect on Daniel and Drayton. There were those in his
own day who compared him to Homer: one of the most remarkable instances of
thoroughly unlucky critical extravagance to be found in literary history,
as the following very fair average specimen will show:--
"Henry (as if by miracle preserved by foreigns long,
From hence-meant treasons) did arrive to right his natives' wrong:
And chiefly to Lord Stanley, and some other succours, as
Did wish and work for better days, the rival welcome was.
Now Richard heard that Richmond was assisted and ashore,
And like unkennel'd Cerberus, the crooked tyrant swore,
And all complexions act at once confusedly in him:
He studieth, striketh, threats, entreats, and looketh mildly grim,
Mistrustfully he trusteth, and he dreadingly did dare,
And forty passions in a trice, in him consort and square.
But when, by his consented force, his foes increased more,
He hastened battle, finding his co-rival apt therefore.
When Richmond, orderly in all, had battled his aid,
Inringed by his complices, their cheerful leader said:
'Now is the time and place (sweet friends) and we the persons be
That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we.
No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was in deed
Worse than our foe, whose works will act my words, if well he speed:
For ill to ills superlative are easily enticed,
But entertains amendment as the Gergesites did Christ.
Be valiant then, he biddeth so that would not be outbid,
For courage yet shall honour him though base, that better did.
I am right heir Lancastrian, he, in York's destroyed right
Usurpeth: but through either ours, for neither claim I fight,
But for our country's long-lack'd weal, for England's peace I war:
Wherein He speed us! unto Whom I all events refer.'
Meanwhile had furious Richard set his armies in array,
And then, with looks even like himself, this or the like did say:
'Why, lads, shall yonder Welshman with his stragglers overmatch?
Disdain ye not such rivals, and defer ye their dispatch?
Shall Tudor from Plantagenet, the crown by cracking snatch?
Know Richard's very thoughts' (he touch'd the diadem he wore)
'Be metal of this metal: then believe I love it more
Than that for other law than life, to supersede my claim,
And lesser must not be his plea that counterpleads the same.'
The weapons overtook his words, and blows they bravely change,
When, like a lion thirsting blood, did moody Richard range,
And made large slaughters where he went, till Richmond he espied,
Whom singling, after doubtful swords, the valorous tyrant died."
Of the sonnet compositions of Daniel and Drayton something has been said
already. But Daniel's sonnets are a small and Drayton's an infinitesimal
part of the work of the two poets respectively. Samuel Daniel was a
Somersetshire man, born near Taunton in 1562. He is said to have been the
son of a music master, but was educated at Oxford, made powerful friends,
and died an independent person at Beckington, in the county of his birth,
in the year 1619. He was introduced early to good society and patronage,
became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, a great heiress of the North, was
favoured by the Earl of Southampton, and became a member of the Pembroke or
_Arcadia_ coterie. His friends or his merits obtained for him, it is said,
the Mastership of the Revels, the posts of Gentleman Extraordinary to James
I., and Groom of the Privy Chamber to Anne of Denmark. His literary
production besides _Delia_ was considerable. With the first authorised
edition of that collection he published _The Complaint of Rosamond_; a
historical poem of great grace and elegance though a little wanting in
strength. In 1594 came his interesting Senecan tragedy of _Cleopatra_; in
1595 the first part of his chief work, _The History of the Civil Wars_, and
in 1601 a collected folio of "Works." Then he rested, at any rate from
publication, till 1605, when he produced _Philotas_, another Senecan
tragedy in verse. In prose he wrote the admirable _Defence of Rhyme_, which
finally smashed the fancy for classical metres dear even to such a man as
Campion. _Hymen's Triumph_, a masque of great beauty, was not printed till
four years before his death. He also wrote a History of England as well as
minor works. The poetical value of Daniel may almost be summed up in two
words--sweetness and dignity. He is decidedly wanting in strength, and,
despite _Delia_, can hardly be said to have had a spark of passion. Even in
his own day it was doubted whether he had not overweighted himself with his
choice of historical subjects, though the epithet of "well-languaged,"
given to him at the time, evinces a real comprehension of one of his best
claims to attention. No writer of the period has such a command of pure
English, unadulterated by xenomania and unweakened by purism, as Daniel.
Whatever unfavourable things have been said of him from time to time have
been chiefly based on the fact that his chaste and correct style lacks the
fiery quaintness, the irregular and audacious attraction of his
contemporaries. Nor was he less a master of versification than of
vocabulary. His _Defence of Rhyme_ shows that he possessed the theory: all
his poetical works show that he was a master of the practice. He rarely
attempted and probably would not have excelled in the lighter lyrical
measures. But in the grave music of the various elaborate stanzas in which
the Elizabethan poets delighted, and of which the Spenserian, though the
crown and flower, is only the most perfect, he was a great proficient, and
his couplets and blank verse are not inferior. Some of his single lines
have already been quoted, and many more might be excerpted from his work of
the best Elizabethan brand in the quieter kind. Quiet, indeed, is the
overmastering characteristic of Daniel. It was this no doubt which made him
prefer the stately style of his Senecan tragedies, and the hardly more
disturbed structure of pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies, like the
_Queen's Arcadia_ and _Hymen's Triumph_, to the boisterous revels of the
stage proper in his time. He had something of the schoolmaster in his
nature as well as in his history. Nothing is more agreeable to him than to
moralise; not indeed in any dull or crabbed manner, but in a mellifluous
and at the same time weighty fashion, of which very few other poets have
the secret. It is perhaps by his scrupulous propriety, by his anxious
decency (to use the word not in its modern and restricted sense, but in its
proper meaning of the generally becoming), that Daniel brought upon himself
the rather hard saying that he had a manner "better suiting prose."
The sentence will scarcely be echoed by any one who has his best things
before him, however much a reader of some of the duller parts of the
historical poems proper may feel inclined to echo it. Of his sonnets one
has been given. The splendid Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland is not
surpassed as ethical poetry by anything of the period, and often as it has
been quoted, it must be given again, for it is not and never can be too
well known:--
"He that of such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong
His settled peace, or to disturb the same:
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may
The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey!
"And with how free an eye doth he look down
Upon these lower regions of turmoil!
Where all the storms of passion mainly beat
On flesh and blood: where honour, power, renown,
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil;
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet
As frailty doth; and only great doth seem
To little minds, who do it so esteem.
"He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars
But only as on stately robberies;
Where evermore the fortune that prevails
Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars
The fairest and the best fac'd enterprise.
Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails:
Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still
Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.
"He sees the face of right t'appear as manifold
As are the passions of uncertain man;
Who puts it in all colours, all attires,
To serve his ends, and make his courses hold.
He sees, that let deceit work what it can,
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires,
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet
All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit.
"Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder cracks
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow
Of Power, that proudly sits on others' crimes;
Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks.
The storms of sad confusion, that may grow
Up in the present for the coming times
Appal not him; that hath no side at all,
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.
"Although his heart (so near allied to Earth)
Cannot but pity the perplexed state
Of troublous and distress'd Mortality,
That thus make way unto the ugly birth
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget
Affliction upon imbecility:
Yet seeing thus the course of things must run,
He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done.
"And whilst distraught ambition compasses,
And is encompass'd; whilst as craft deceives,
And is deceiv'd: whilst man doth ransack man
And builds on blood, and rises by distress;
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves
To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon,
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture in impiety."
In sharp contrast with this the passage from _Hymen's Triumph_,
"Ah, I remember well, and how can I,"
shows the sweetness without namby-pambyness which Daniel had at constant
command. Something of the same contrast may be found between the whole of
_Hymen's Triumph_ and the _Queen's Arcadia_ on the one side, and
_Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_ on the other. All are written in mixed blank and
rhymed verse, much interlaced and "enjambed." The best of the historical
poems is, by common consent, _Rosamond_, which is instinct with a most
remarkable pathos, nor are fine passages by any means to seek in the
greater length and less poetical subject of _The Civil Wars of York and
Lancaster_. The fault of this is that the too conscientious historian is
constantly versifying what must be called mere expletive matter. This must
always make any one who speaks with critical impartiality admit that much
of Daniel is hard reading; but the soft places (to use the adjective in no
ill sense) are frequent enough, and when the reader comes to them he must
have little appreciation of poetry if he does not rejoice in the foliage
and the streams of the poetical oasis which has rewarded him after his
pilgrimage across a rather arid wilderness.
Michael Drayton was much better fitted for the arduous, and perhaps not
wholly legitimate, business of historical poetry than Daniel. If his genius
was somewhat less fine, it was infinitely better thewed and sinewed. His
ability, indeed, to force any subject which he chose to treat into poetry
is amazing, and can hardly be paralleled elsewhere except in a poet who was
born but just before Drayton's death, John Dryden. He was pretty certainly
a gentleman by birth, though not of any great possessions, and is said to
have been born at Hartshill, in Warwickshire, in the year 1563. He is also
said, but not known, to have been a member of the University of Oxford, and
appears to have been fairly provided with patrons, in the family of some
one of whom he served as page, though he never received any great or
permanent preferment.[29] On the other hand, he was not a successful
dramatist (the only literary employment of the time that brought in much
money), and friend as he was of nearly all the men of letters of the time,
it is expressly stated in one of the few personal notices we have of him,
that he could not "swagger in a tavern or domineer in a hothouse" [house of
ill-fame]--that is to say, that the hail-fellow well-met Bohemianism of the
time, which had led Marlowe and many of his group to evil ends, and which
was continued in a less outrageous form under the patronage of Ben Jonson
till far into the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have lived
somehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in
_The Citizen of the World_, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance of
the best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeed
alone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent among contemporaries eminent
for it.
[29] Drayton has been thoroughly treated by Professor Oliver Elton in
_Michael Drayton_ (London, 1905), enlarged from a monograph for the Spenser
Society.
Drayton's long life was as industrious as it was long. He began in 1591
with a volume of sacred verse, the _Harmony of the Church_, which, for some
reason not merely undiscovered but unguessed, displeased the censors, and
was never reprinted with his other works until recently. Two years later
appeared _Idea, The Shepherd's Garland_--a collection of eclogues not to be
confounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the same
real or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of these
Drayton called himself "Rowland," or "Roland," a fact on which some rather
rickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him in
Spenser. His next work was _Mortimeriados_, afterwards refashioned and
completed under the title of _The Barons' Wars_, and this was followed in
1597 by one of his best works, _England's Heroical Epistles_. _The Owl_,
some _Legends_, and other poems succeeded; and in 1605 he began to collect
his Works, which were frequently reprinted. The mighty poem of the
_Polyolbion_ was the fruit of his later years, and, in strictness, belongs
to the period of a later chapter; but Drayton's muse is eminently one and
indivisible, and, notwithstanding the fruits of pretty continual study
which his verses show, they belong, in the order of thought, to the middle
and later Elizabethan period rather than to the Jacobean.
Few poets of anything like Drayton's volume (of which some idea may be
formed by saying that his works, in the not quite complete form in which
they appear in Chalmers, fill five hundred of the bulky pages of that work,
each page frequently containing a hundred and twenty-eight lines) show such
uniform mixture of imagination and vigour. In the very highest and rarest
graces of poetry he is, indeed, by common consent wanting, unless one of
these graces in the uncommon kind of the war-song be allowed, as perhaps it
may be, to the famous and inimitable though often imitated _Ballad of
Agincourt_, "To the brave Cambro-Britons and their Harp," not to be
confounded with the narrative "Battle of Agincourt," which is of a less
rare merit. The Agincourt ballad,
"Fair stood the wind for France,"
is quite at the head of its own class of verse in England--Campbell's two
masterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "Six
Hundred," falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short of
it. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and the
skill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogether
beyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see
_ante_) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and such
elaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his great
qualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous _Polyolbion_,
written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any in
English--the Alexandrine--crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obliging
the author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superadded
ornament, in elaborately patched-on passages, than in the actual and
natural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another than
the mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative passage:--
"The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise,
(As they who only sought ambitiously to raise
The blood of God-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear:
And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air
(Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make)
Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take,
That any petty hill upon the English side,
Should dare, not (with a crouch) to veil unto their pride.
When Wrekin, as a hill his proper worth that knew,
And understood from whence their insolency grew,
For all that they appear'd so terrible in sight,
Yet would not once forego a jot that was his right,
And when they star'd on him, to them the like he gave,
And answer'd glance for glance, and brave for brave:
That, when some other hills which English dwellers were,
The lusty Wrekin saw himself so well to bear
Against the Cambrian part, respectless of their power;
His eminent disgrace expecting every hour
Those flatterers that before (with many cheerful look)
Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook,
And muffled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black,
Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack:
That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear
(Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear;
He, having none but them, they having none but he
Which to their mutual joy might either's object be)
Within their secret breast conceived sundry fears,
And as they mix'd their streams, for him so mix'd their tears.
Whom, in their coming down, when plainly he discerns,
For them his nobler heart in his strong bosom yearns:
But, constantly resolv'd, that dearer if they were
The Britons should not yet all from the English bear;
'Therefore,' quoth he, 'brave flood, tho' forth by Cambria brought,
Yet as fair England's friend, or mine thou would'st be thought
(O Severn) let thine ear my just defence partake.'"
Happy phrases abound, and, moreover, every now and then there are set
pieces, as they may be called, of fanciful description which are full of
beauty; for Drayton (a not very usual thing in a man of such unflagging
industry, and even excellence of work) was full of fancy. The fairy poem of
_Nymphidia_ is one of the most graceful trifles in the language, possessing
a dancing movement and a felicitous choice of imagery and language which
triumphantly avoid the trivial on the one hand, and the obviously burlesque
on the other. The singular satirical or quasi-satirical poems of _The
Mooncalf_, _The Owl_, and _The Man in the Moon_, show a faculty of comic
treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics
called _Odes_ (of which the _Ballad of Agincourt_ is sometimes classed as
one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command
displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could
write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any
conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was
Drayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge
_Polyolbion_, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist of
three divisions--_The Barons' Wars_ in eight-lined stanzas, the _Heroic
Epistles_ (suggested, of course, by Ovid, though anything but Ovidian) in
heroic couplets, _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ in the same stanza as
_The Barons' Wars_, and _Four Legends_ in stanzas of various form and
range. That this mass of work should possess, or should, indeed, admit of
the charms of poetry which distinguish _The Faerie Queene_ would be
impossible, even if Drayton had been Spenser, which he was far from being.
But to speak of his "dull creeping narrative," to accuse him of the
"coarsest vulgarities," of being "flat and prosaic," and so on, as was done
by eighteenth-century critics, is absolutely uncritical, unless it be very
much limited. _The Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, the author being too
careful to give a minute history of a not particularly interesting subject,
and neglecting to take the only possible means of making it interesting by
bringing out strongly the characters of heroes and heroines, and so
infusing a dramatic interest. But this absence of character is a constant
drawback to the historical poems of the time. And even here we find many
passages where the drawback of the stanza for narrative is most skilfully
avoided, and where the vigour of the single lines and phrases is
unquestionable on any sound estimate.
Still the stanza, though Drayton himself defends it (it should be mentioned
that his prose prefaces are excellent, and constitute another link between
him and Dryden), is something of a clog; and the same thing is felt in _The
Miseries of Queen Margaret_ and the _Legends_, where, however, it is again
not difficult to pick out beauties. The _Heroical Epistles_ can be praised
with less allowance. Their shorter compass, their more manageable metre
(for Drayton was a considerable master of the earlier form of couplet), and
the fact that a personal interest is infused in each, give them a great
advantage; and, as always, passages of great merit are not infrequent.
Finally, Drayton must have the praise (surely not quite irrelevant) of a
most ardent and lofty spirit of patriotism. Never was there a better
Englishman, and as his love of his country spirited him up to the brilliant
effort of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, so it sustained him through the
"strange herculean task" of the _Polyolbion_, and often put light and life
into the otherwise lifeless mass of the historic poems. Yet I have myself
no doubt that these historic poems were a mistake, and that their
composition, though prompted by a most creditable motive, the burning
attachment to England which won the fight with Spain, and laid the
foundation of the English empire, was not altogether, perhaps was not by
any means, according to knowledge.
The almost invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idle
controversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in the
case of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made in his own
_Virgidemiarum_--
"Follow me who list,
And be the _second_ English satirist."
It has been pleaded in Hall's favour that although the date of publication
of his _Satires_ is known, the date of their composition is not known. It
is not even necessary to resort to this kind of special pleading; for
nothing can be more evident than that the bravado is not very serious. On
the literal supposition, however, and if we are to suppose that publication
immediately followed composition, Hall was anticipated by more than one or
two predecessors, in the production of work not only specifically satirical
but actually called satire, and by two at least in the adoption of the
heroic couplet form which has ever since been consecrated to the subject.
Satirical poetry, of a kind, is of course nearly if not quite as old as the
language, and in the hands of Skelton it had assumed various forms. But the
satire proper--the following of the great Roman examples of Horace,
Juvenal, and Persius in general lashing of vice and folly--can hardly trace
itself further back in England than George Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_, which
preceded Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ by twenty years, and is interesting not
only for itself but as being ushered in by the earliest known verses of
Walter Raleigh. It is written in blank verse, and is a rather rambling
commentary on the text _vanitas vanitatum_, but it expressly calls itself a
satire and answers sufficiently well to the description. More immediate
and nearer examples were to be found in the Satires of Donne and Lodge. The
first named were indeed, like the other poetical works of their
marvellously gifted writer, not published till many years after; but
universal tradition ascribes the whole of Donne's profane poems to his
early youth, and one document exists which distinctly dates "John Donne,
his Satires," as early as 1593. We shall therefore deal with them, as with
the other closely connected work of their author, here and in this chapter.
But there has to be mentioned first the feebler but chronologically more
certain work of Thomas Lodge, _A Fig for Momus_, which fulfils both the
requirements of known date and of composition in couplets. It appeared in
1595, two years before Hall, and is of the latest and weakest of Lodge's
verse work. It was written or at least produced when he was just abandoning
his literary and adventurous career and settling down as a quiet physician
with no more wild oats to sow, except, perhaps, some participation in
popish conspiracy. The style did not lend itself to the display of any of
Lodge's strongest gifts--romantic fancy, tenderness and sweetness of
feeling, or elaborate embroidery of precious language. He follows Horace
pretty closely and with no particular vigour. Nor does the book appear to
have attracted much attention, so that it is just possible that Hall may
not have heard of it. If, however, he had not, it is certainly a curious
coincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on the
couplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried.
For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively brief
space of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturally
accompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in so
many ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly be
any more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which these
writers, especially Donne and Marston, took to give individuality and
"bite" to their work was as faulty as it now seems to us peculiar.
Ben Jonson, the least gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said of
John Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," and I
own that without going through the long catalogue of singularly
contradictory criticisms which have been passed on Donne, I feel disposed
to fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium.
Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but that
does not matter. It is sufficient for me that in one special point of the
poetic charm--the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by a
flood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capable
imagination--Donne is surpassed by no poet of any language, and equalled by
few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all
probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the
fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost
perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which
came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently
licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highest
poetry with the lowest doggerel, the noblest thought with the most trivial
crotchet--all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it only
chequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts and
graces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets,
although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlier
than 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappeared
wholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence of
no poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towards
his own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, except
that of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as
"A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,"
expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headed
by Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in the
same monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet"
(that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifying
which Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of the
nation."
His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, in
the earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at both
universities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, a
law-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the Roman
Church, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced some
religious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean of
St. Paul's, and died in 1631.
It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition of
most, and that all but certain documentary evidence points to the
composition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unless
the date of the Harleian MS. is a forgery, some of his satires were written
in or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling passion,
without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would also
incline us to assign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, and
many of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and more
reflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatory
character of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. All
alike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality--the fiery imagination
shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy
thoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has a
peculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture of
voluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought from
the marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of French
Renaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English.
The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of the
discovery of
"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone"
of his own long interred skeleton: the wish--
"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who died before the god of love was born,"
and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpected
places, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. In
some of his poems, as the _Anatomy of the World_, occasioned by the death
of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (only
touches here) of the passion which had distinguished the author earlier
(for the _Anatomy_ is not an early work), and with religious and
philosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam--shot through,
however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry.
Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. And
the three following pieces, the "Dream," a fragment of satire, and an
extract from the _Anatomy_, may or may not, according to taste, supply
it:--
"Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream.
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy:
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it:
Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams true, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.
"As lightning or a taper's light
Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lov'st truth) an angel at first sight,
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then;
_I must confess, it could not choose but be_
_Profane to think thee anything but thee._
"Coming and staying show'd thee thee,
But rising makes me doubt that now
Thou art not thou.
That love is weak where fears are strong as he;
'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave,
If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have.
Perchance as torches which must ready be
Men light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me.
Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then I
Will dream that hope again, or else would die."
* * * * *
"O age of rusty iron! some better wit
Call it some worse name, if ought equal it.
Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: now
Injustice is sold dearer far; allow
All claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anon
The money, which you sweat and swear for's gone
Into other hands; so controverted lands
'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands.
If law be in the judge's heart, and he
Have no heart to resist letter or fee,
Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts below
Flows from the first main head, and these can throw
Thee, if they suck thee in, to misery,
To fetters, halters. But if th' injury
Steel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'st
Against the stream upwards when thou art most
Heavy and most faint; and in these labours they
'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy way
Become great seas, o'er which when thou shalt be
Forc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt see
That all thy gold was drowned in them before."
* * * * *
"She, whose fair body no such prison was
But that a soul might well be pleased to pass
An age in her; she, whose rich beauty lent
Mintage to other beauties, for they went
But for so much as they were like to her;
She, in whose body (if we dare prefer
This low world to so high a mark as she),
The western treasure, eastern spicery,
Europe and Afric, and the unknown rest
Were easily found, or what in them was best;
And when we've made this large discovery
Of all, in her some one part then will be
Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is
Enough to make twenty such worlds as this;
She, whom had they known, who did first betroth
The tutelar angels and assigned one both
To nations, cities, and to companies,
To functions, offices, and dignities,
And to each several man, to him and him,
They would have giv'n her one for every limb;
She, of whose soul if we may say 'twas gold,
Her body was th' electrum and did hold
Many degrees of that; we understood
Her by her sight; _her pure and eloquent blood_
_Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought_
_That one might almost say, her body thought_;
She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is gone
And chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl upon
Our prison's prison earth, nor think us well
Longer than whilst we bear our brittle shell."
But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a full
anthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of English
literature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry,"
though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedly
glaring faults.
Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither the
unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern
propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and
miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor,
naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly
noteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other
hand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere better
shown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their just
admiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, instead
of going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature,
merely give us fresh studies of _Ibam forte via sacra_ or the Tenth of
Juvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne is
not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his
contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and
single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the
breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a
little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston,
and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the _Transformed
Metamorphosis_ of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of
discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a
mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that
it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients
intended the _Satura_ to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well
as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure
of all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (as
far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his
versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire.
At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian
lengthening of the mute _e_; at another the writer seems to be emulating
Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final
iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets
of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they
could not mistake the force of observation and expression which
characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his
dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and
most passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.
These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan
satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess,
to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and
their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation
of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they
all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest
writer of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the most
sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins
considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant
and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers
who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed
by their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argues
either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoble
simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the
public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in
English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed over
in any account of it.
Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeoman
rank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel at
Cambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living of
Hawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich,
of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and,
not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburb
of his cathedral city. His later life was important for religious
literature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter of
which he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger and
greater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his early
Cambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They have
on the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matter
and the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time to
some extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, is
the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the
best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his
literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the
other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral
indignation. Indeed the want of sincerity--the evidence of the literary
exercise--injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We do
not, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrew
prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a
vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief.
Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist--a writer who took
some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a
whole one may be given:--
"A gentle squire would gladly entertain
Into his house some trencher-chaplain;[30]
Some willing man that might instruct his sons
And that would stand to good conditions.
First, that he lie upon the truckle bed,
Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head.
Second, that he do, on no default,[31]
Ever presume to sit above the salt.
Third, that he never change his trencher twice.
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies;
Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait.
Last, that he never his young master beat,
But he must ask his mother to define,
How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observ'd he could contented be
To give five marks and winter livery."
[30] "Chaplain"--trisyllable like "capellan."
[31] Missing syllable.
John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it
would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into
Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College,
Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved
himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which
have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decade
of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much
greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took
orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of
his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in
1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of
his--_Pigmalion's Image_ and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same
year by a sequel, entitled _The Scourge of Villainy_. In these works he
called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations
have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both
the earlier Satires and _The Scourge_ denounce lewd verse most
fullmouthedly, _Pigmalion's Image_ is a poem in the _Venus and Adonis_
style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious
descriptions. It was, in fact, with the _Satires_ and much similar work,
formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston
industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of
the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some
at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are
correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate
"society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding
thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make
the identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writers
who delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history of
the world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusations
against their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partly
draws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however,
has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent;
and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not come
quite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments
for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical
kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant,
fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought.
"Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth'd Lamians,
Shape-changing Proteans, damn'd Briarians,
Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep,
That ye thus dare unto Jove's palace creep?
What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip,
That ye dare strive on Hebe's cup to sip?
Ye know Apollo's quiver is not spent,
But can abate your daring hardiment.
Python is slain, yet his accursed race
Dare look divine Astrea in the face;
Chaos return and with confusion
Involve the world with strange disunion;
For Pluto sits in that adored chair
Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir.
O hecatombs! O catastrophe!
From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary!
Prometheus, who celestial fire
Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire
Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind,
Whereby we might the depth of nature find,
Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart
Which did such deep philosophy impart
To mortal men."
The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches of
Marston's own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of the
style, is very curious.
Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book _Skialetheia_, published
between the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist from
either, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is the
same exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity of
phrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But the
fine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous
_Transformed Metamorphosis_, attributed to the powerful but extravagant
dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing:--
"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto,
Whereon in female shape a serpent stands.
Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow,
With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants,
And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts
The pleasure that doth seem there to be found,
She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.
"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall
Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue;
The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale
There minulize their pleasing lays anew,
This welcome to the bitter bed of rue;
This little room will scarce two wights contain
T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.
"But next thereto adjoins a spacious room,
More fairly fair adorned than the other:
(O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom,
That to these shadows hath his mind given over)
For (O) he never shall his soul recover:
If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack
And his repentant hand him hales not back."[32]
[32] Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might
have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna of
fancy,--a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from minurizo, "I
sing." "To awhape" = "to confound."
We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy
and the serene loveliness of _The Faerie Queene_.