The great period of English poetry begins half-way through the sixteenth
century, and lasts half-way into the seventeenth. In the poetry strictly
of the sixteenth century, before the drama had absorbed poetry into the
substance of its many energies, verse is used as speech, and becomes
song by way of speech. It was the age of youth, and rejoiced, as youth
does, in scarcely tried strength and in the choice of adventure. And it
was an adventure to write. Soldiers and voyagers, Sidney, Raleigh, led
the way as on horses and in ships. It is Raleigh, in the preface to a
deeply meditated "History of the World," who speaks gallantly of
"leisure to have made myself a fool in print." New worlds had been found
beyond the sea, and were to be had for the finding in all the regions of
the mind. There were buried worlds of the mind which had lately been dug
up, lands had been newly colonized, in Italy and in France; à kind of
second nature, it seemed to men in those days, which might be used not
less freely than nature itself. And, just as the Renaissance in Italy
was a new discovery of the mind, through a return to what had been found
out in antiquity and buried during the Middle Ages, so, in England,
poetry came to a consciousness of itself by way of what had already been
discovered by poets like Petrarch and Ronsard, and even their later apes
and mimics, Serafino or Desportes, among those spoils. Poetry had to be
reawakened, and these were the messengers of dawn. Once awakened, the
English tongue could but sing, for a while, to borrowed tunes; yet it
sang with its own voice, and the personal accent brought a new quality
into the song. Song-writers and sonnet-writers, when they happened to be
poets, found out themselves by the way, and not least when they thought
they were doing honor to a foreign ideal.
And it was an age of music. Music, too, had come from Italy, and had
found for once a home there. Music, singing and dancing made then, and
then only, the "merry England" of the phrase. And the words, growing out
of the same soil as the tunes, took equal root. Campion sums up for us a
whole period, and the song-books have preserved for us names, but for
them unknown, of perfect craftsmen in the two arts. Every man, by the
mere feeling and fashion of the time, took care
to write
Worthy the reading and the world's delight.
It was an age of personal utterance; and men spoke frankly, without
restraint, too nice choosing, or any of the timidities or exaggerations
of self-consciousness. The personal utterance might take any form;
whether Fulke Greville wrote "treatises" on the mind of man, or Drayton
pried into the family affairs of the fairies, or Samuel Daniel thought
out sonnets to Delia, or Lodge wantoned in cadences and caprices of the
senses. It might seem but to pass on an alien message, in as literal a
translation as it could compass of a French or Italian poem. In the hand
of a poet two things came into the version: magic, and the personal
utterance, if in no other way, through the medium of style.
Style, to the poets of the sixteenth century, was much of what went to
the making of that broad simplicity, that magnificently obvious
eloquence, which seems to us now to have the universal quality of the
greatest poetry. The poets of the nineteenth century are no nearer to
nature, though they seem more individual because they have made an art
of extracting rare emotions, and because they take themselves to pieces
more cunningly. Drayton's great sonnet is the epilogue, and Spenser's
great poem the epithalamium, for all lovers; but it needs another
Shelley to find out love in the labyrinth of "Epipsychidion." All that
is greatest in the poetry of the sixteenth century is open to all the
world, like a wood, or Arcadia, in which no road is fenced with
prohibitions, and the flowers are all for the picking.
And when, in the nineteenth century, poetry began again, it was to the
poets of the sixteenth century that the new poets looked back, finding
the pattern there for what they were making over again for themselves. A
few snatches from Elizabethan song-books were enough to direct the first
awakenings of song in Blake; Wordsworth found his gnomic and rational
style, as of a lofty prose, in Samuel Daniel; Keats rifled the best
sweets of Lodge's orchard; and Shelley found in the elegies of Michael
Drayton the model of his incomparable style of familiar speech in verse,
the style of the _Letter to Maris Gisborne._ Every reader of modern
verse will find something contemporary in even the oldest of these
poems; partly because modern verse is directly founded on this verse of
the sixteenth century, and partly because the greatest poetry is
contemporary with all ages.
Byron is to be judged by the whole mountainous mass of his world and not
by any fragment of colored or glittering spar which one's pick may have
extricated from the precipitous hillside. His world is a kind of natural
formation, high enough to climb, and wide enough to walk On. There is
hard climbing and heavy walking, but, once there, the air braces and the
view is wide.
In making a selection from this large and uneven mass of poetry, it is
difficult to do justice to a writer who was almost never a really good
writer of verse, except in a form of what he rightly defined as
"nondescript and ever-varying rhyme." The seriocomic ottava rima of _Don
Juan_ and _The Vision of Judgment_ is the only meter which Byron ever
completely mastered; and it is only in those unique poems, in which
Goethe detected, for the first time in modern poetry, a "classically
elegant comic style," that Byron is wholly able to express the new
quality which he brought into English literature in a wholly personal,
or at all satisfying, way. From the first he was a new force, but a
force unconscious of direction, with all the uncouthness of nature in
convulsions. He had a strong, direct, and passionate personality, but we
find him, even in the better parts of _Childe Harold_, putting rhetoric
in the place of that simplicity which he was afterward to discover by
accident, as in jest; we find him, throughout almost the whole of the
poetical romances, a mere masquerader in Eastern frippery, which is
scarcely the better because it happened to have been bought on the spot;
we find him, in his serious reflections, either quite sensible and quite
obvious, or, as in addresses to the ocean, and the like, straining on
tiptoe toward heights that can only be reached by wings. His lyric verse
was always without magic, and only now and then, and chiefly in the
lines beginning "When we two parted," was he able to turn speech into a
kind of emphatic and intense chant, into which poetry comes as a kind of
momentary suspension of the emphasis. His rendering of actual sensation,
as in parts of _Mazeppa_, is the nearest approach to poetry which he
made in those poems which were supposed to be the very voice of passion.
Everything that he wrote in blank verse, and consequently the whole of
the plays, is vitiated by his incapacity to handle that meter, or indeed
to distinguish it, in any vital or audible way, from prose. Now and
again personal feeling flung off the ill-fitting and constraining
clothes of rhetoric, and stood up naked; sentiments of resentment,
against his wife, or against the world, or against himself, made poetry
sometimes. Then, as it was to be under other conditions in the later
work, his flame is the burning of much dross: excellent food for flames.
And yet, out of all this writing which is hardly literature, this poetry
which is hardly verse, there comes, even to the reader of to-day, for
whom "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme" is as dead and buried
as Napoleon, some inexplicable thrill, appeal, potency; Byron still
lives, and we shall never cease to read almost his worst work, because
some warmth of his life comes through it. Almost everything that he
wrote was written for relief, and its effect on us is due to something
never actually said in it; it is a kind of wild dramatic speech of some
person in a play, whose words become weighty, tragic and pathetic
because of the fierce light thrown upon them by a significant character
and by transfiguring circumstances.
When Byron wrote to Murray, "You might as well want a midnight all stats
as rhyme all perfect," he was theorizing over his own failure to achieve
sustained excellence on any one level Luckily he carried the theory, in
his own downright way, into practise, and, in the "versified Aurora
Borealis" of the great comic poems, the defect turns into a quality, and
creates what is really a new poetical form. Byron is a heroical Buffoon,
the great jester of English poetry; and he is this because he is the
only English poet who is wholly buoyant, arrogant and irresponsible. "I
never know the word which will come next," he boasts, in _Don Juan_, and
for once, improvisation becomes a means to an end, almost an end in
itself. It is in the comic verse, strangely enough, that the first real
mastery over form shows itself: a genius for rhyme which becomes a new
music and decoration, as of cap and bells on the head of sober marching
verse, and a genius for plain statement which leaves prose behind in
mere fighting force, and glorifies fighting force with a divine natural
illumination.