ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS CAUSE—THE
INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS—HAWES—THE FIRST TUDOR
CRITICS—WILSON: HIS ‘ART OF RHETORIC’; HIS ATTACK ON “INKHORN
TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES—CHEKE: HIS RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND
ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST—ASCHAM—HIS PATRIOTISM—HIS
HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE ‘MORTE D’ARTHUR’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL
ATTITUDE TO PROSE, AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL
METRES—SPECIAL WANTS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—ITS KINDS: (1)
CHAUCERIAN—(2) ALLITERATIVE—(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL
THREE—THE TEMPTATIONS OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT—ITS ADVENTURERS:
ASCHAM HIMSELF—WATSON AND DRANT—GASCOIGNE—HIS ‘NOTES OF
INSTRUCTION’—THEIR CAPITAL VALUE—SPENSER AND HARVEY—THE PURITAN
ATTACK ON POETRY—GOSSON—‘THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE’—LODGE’S
‘REPLY’—SIDNEY’S ‘APOLOGY FOR POETRY’—ABSTRACT OF IT—ITS MINOR
SHORTCOMINGS AND MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR AMPLE
COMPENSATION—KING JAMES’S ‘REULIS AND CAUTELIS’—WEBBE’S
‘DISCOURSE’—SLIGHT IN KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC, IF UNCRITICAL, IN
APPRECIATION—PUTTENHAM’S (?) ‘ART OF ENGLISH POESIE’—ITS
ERUDITION—SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT INDULGENCE IN
FIGURES—MINORS: HARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER, BOLTON, ETC.—CAMPION AND
HIS ‘OBSERVATIONS’—DANIEL AND HIS ‘DEFENCE OF RHYME’—BACON—THE
‘ESSAYS’—THE ‘ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING’—ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE
WORD-STUDY—ITS VIEW OF POETRY—SOME “OBITER DICTA”—THE WHOLE OF VERY
SLIGHT IMPORTANCE—STIRLING’S “ANACRISIS”—BEN JONSON: HIS
EQUIPMENT—HIS ‘PREFACES,’ ETC.—THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS—THE
‘DISCOVERIES’—FORM OF THE BOOK—ITS DATE—MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW—THE
FLING AT MONTAIGNE—AT ‘TAMERLANE’—THE SHAKESPEARE PASSAGE—AND THAT
ON BACON—GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
The fortune of England in matters political has often been noticed; and
it has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less often, in matters
literary. One of the luckiest of these chances came at the time of the
Renaissance; when the necessary changes were effected with the minimum
of direct foreign influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the
nation and the language was able completely, or almost completely, to
assimilate the influences, both foreign and classical, that rained upon
it.
Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.[198] The history of
this part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much
neglected; and it can hardly be said even yet to have received
comprehensive attention. [Sidenote: _Backwardness of English Criticism
not implying inferiority._] It is all the more necessary to bestow some
time and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope of correcting an
unfair depreciation. The Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd
appreciation of contrast between English and Scottish characteristics
which belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel
Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as he [the Baron] had seen in
other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the Colonel’s country, “to
derogate from the honour of his burgonet.” Gentlemen of the most
undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in literature), from
Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in regard to
English criticism. But there has been something too much of it; and it
has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has
expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make _un véritable marché de
dupe_ if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for
Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion
on that question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour
to make it do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign
company, our own critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and
Addison, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold
himself, would be “_un véritable marché de_”—Moses Primrose.
-----
Footnote 198:
The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, _op. cit._, in the
division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling,
_Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth_, Philadelphia,
1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in _Ancient
Critical Essays_, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most
important separately in his _English Reprints_. Mr Gregory Smith is
now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet
issued.
-----
It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the
backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some
extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more
distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this
history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades
afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the
English language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in
fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the _naïf_ and interesting,
but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.[199]
-----
Footnote 199:
Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the strictures
passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the “default in mine
English” (_History of Troy_); on the “right good and fair English” of
Lord Rivers (_Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers_).
-----
The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of a single form
of “curial” speech for literary purposes, but until sufficient
experiments have been made in at least a majority of the branches of
literature, criticism is impossible, and would, if possible, be rather
mischievous than beneficial. [Sidenote: _Its cause._] Now England,
though it possessed at least one very great author, and more than a fair
number of respectable seconds to him, was, up to 1500 at least, in
neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had been
practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end of the
fifteenth, if not till far into the seventeenth, so far as literature
was concerned. Nor, till the towering eminence of Chaucer had helped to
bring the vernacular into prominence, was there any one settled dialect
of primacy in the vernacular itself. Further, the fifteenth century was
nearly at its end before any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects,
was written; and for another century the proportion of translation over
original work in prose was very large indeed.
At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always played to
criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who keeps his pupil out
of the full enjoyment of his property, yet preserves that property in
good condition to hand over to him perforce at some future time—was
still faithfully taught.[200] [Sidenote: _The influence of Rhetoric and
other matters._] The enlarged and more accurate study of the classics at
the Revival of Learning set classical criticism once more before
students in the originals; the eager study of those originals by
Continental scholars was sure to reflect itself upon England; and,
lastly, religious zeal and other motives combined, here as elsewhere, to
make men determined to get the vernacular into as complete and useful a
condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense national spirit, which
is the glory of the Tudor period, appear more strongly than in this our
scholastic and “umbratile” division of the national life.
-----
Footnote 200:
There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue that
despite the constant use of the _word_ Rhetoric in the fifteenth
century, the teaching of the _thing_ had declined. I do not think
there is much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and
curious passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong
evidence against it. Rhetoric has no less than _eight_ chapters of the
_Pastime of Pleasure_, as against _one_ apiece for Grammar and Logic.
-----
Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made its
appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth century,
critical appreciation, stereotyped and unmethodised it may be, but
genuine for all that, and stimulating, had made its appearance.
[Sidenote: _Hawes._] The extraordinary quality of Chaucer, the amiable
pastime-making of Gower, and, a little later, the busy polygraphy and
painful rhetoric of Lydgate, had, almost from the moment of Chaucer’s
death, attracted and inspired students. The pretty phrase about
Chaucer’s “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly drew the approval of
a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renaissance work as Mr Arnold,
was, as is known even by tyros in the study of English literature,
repeated, expanded, varied by almost every prominent writer for a
century and a quarter at least, till it reaches, not exactly final, but
most definite and noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes,
that curious swan-singer of English mediæval poetry. In the to us
eccentric, if not positively absurd, exposition of the _Trivium_ and
_Quadrivium_ which diversifies the account of the courtship of
Grandamour and La Bell Pucell,[201] the praise of the Three is led up to
by a discussion of Rhetoric and Poetics so elaborate and minute that it
occupies more space than is given to all the other Arts together, and
nearly double that which is given to all the rest, except a largely
extended Astronomy. Rhetoric herself, after being greeted by and
greeting her pupil in the most “aureate” style, divides herself into
five parts, each of which has its chapter, with a “Replication against
ignorant Persons” intervening, and many curious digressions such as the
description of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four
rivers, “Understanding,” “Closely-Concluding,” “Novelty,” and
“Carbuncles,”[202] and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate has
been already praised for “versifying the depured rhetoric in English
language,” but he comes up once more for eulogy as “_my_ master” in the
peroration, and has in fact considerably more space than either Gower or
Chaucer. Nor, confused and out of focus as such things must necessarily
appear to us, should we forget that Hawes and his generation were not
altogether uncritically endeavouring at what was “important to
_them_”—the strengthening and enriching, namely, of English vocabulary,
the extension of English literary practice and stock.
-----
Footnote 201:
_The Pastime of Pleasure_, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845),
pp. 27-56.
Footnote 202:
This Fourth River will appear a less startling “novelty” when the
_illuminating_ power attributed to the stone is remembered.
-----
Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck above referred
to appears first in the peculiar scholastic character of the criticism
of the first English school of critics deserving the name. [Sidenote:
_The first Tudor critics._] No one of its members was exactly a man of
genius, and this was perhaps lucky; for men of genius have rarely been
observed to make the best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with
the Renaissance adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again,
because the classics alone could supply the training and the models just
then required by English prose, and even to some extent by English
poetry. All were very definitely set against Gallicising and
Italianising; and yet again this was lucky, because England had been
overdosed with French influence for centuries, while their opposition to
Italian did perhaps some good, and certainly little harm. But all were
thoroughly possessed by the idea that English, adjusted to classical
models as far as possible, but not denationalised or denaturalised,
ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as of familiar,
communication for Englishmen. And—with that intense Renaissance belief
in education, and a high and noble kind of education too, which puts to
shame the chattering and pottering of certain later periods on this
unlucky subject—all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring
English up to this point. The tendency was spread over a great number of
persons, and a considerable period of time. Its representatives ranged
from healthy and large-souled, if not quite heroic or inspired, scholars
like Ascham to “acrid-quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief
of these representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has just
been mentioned—Sir[203] Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham.
They were all friends, they were all contemporary members (to her glory
be it ungrudgingly said) of one University, the University of Cambridge,
and though the moral character of all, and especially of the first two,
had something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy, which
were the blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all had the merits of
that type as exhibited in the man of the study rather than of the
field—intense curiosity and industry, a real patriotism, a
half-instinctive eagerness to action, a consciousness how best to adorn
the Sparta that had fallen to their lot, and a business-like faculty of
carrying their conceptions out. From various indications, positive and
indirect, it would seem that Cheke, who was the eldest, was also the
most “magnetic,” the most Socratically suggestive and germinal of the
three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior importance to
that of Ascham and Wilson.
-----
Footnote 203:
Wilson has usually been dignified in this way: but some authorities,
including the _Dict. Nat. Biog._, deny him knighthood.
-----
Wilson’s _Art of Rhetoric_[204] is, as the other dates given in the text
and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the
school; nor is it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for
us. [Sidenote: _Wilson: his_ Art of Rhetoric;] But it deserves
precedence historically because, as no other does, it keys, or gears,
the new critical tendency on to the old technical rhetoric. The first
edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson dates his
prologue to the second[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does not
seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first
edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had
fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of
another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped
literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames.
-----
Footnote 204:
It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having preceded
him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of
Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance.
Footnote 205:
My copy is of this, which is the fuller.
-----
His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old
technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the
rest. [Sidenote: _his attack on “Inkhorn terms.”_] But his third Book,
“Of Elocution,”[206] announces from the first an interest in the matter
very different from the jejune rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly
of those ancients least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics
mostly give us. In fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the
importance of the subject in the very opening of the work itself[207] by
recounting, with much gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius
telleth the tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely
for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as he has
divided the requirements of Elocution under the four heads of Plainness,
Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he opens the stop which has been
recognised as his characteristic one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn
terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed gentlemen” who, on their
return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder
their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-English, another
“chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men, lawyers and
auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary “document”
follows in the censure of the “fine courtier who will talk nothing but
Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in
illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman
which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or
even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself. And he
points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for whom,
as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious
stories from his experience, “when I was in Cambridge, and student in
the King’s College,” and from other sources. After which he falls in
with Cicero as to the qualifications of words allowable.
-----
Footnote 206:
Fol. 82.
Footnote 207:
Fol. 1, _verso_, at bottom.
-----
“Aptness” follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing it, has cut at a
folly of language revived three hundred years and more later than his
own time. [Sidenote: _His dealing with Figures._] For he laughs at one
who, “seeing a house fair-builded,” said to his fellow, “Good Lord, what
a handsome _phrase_ of building is this!” Wilson’s butt would have been
no little thought of by certain persons at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to
remember a sentence about the merits of a “passage” in a marble
chimney-piece, which is a mere echo, conscious or unconscious, of his
“phrase.” The same temper appears in the longer remarks on Composition;
but when we come to Exornation, “a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue
with borrowed words and change of sentence,” Wilson’s lease of
originality has run out. He is still in the bondage of the Figures,
which he describes ambitiously as a kind “not equally sparpled[208]
about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as stars stand in
the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-devised antiques in a
cloth of Arras.” The enumeration is full of character and Elizabethan
piquancy; but it still has the old fault of beginning at the wrong end.
When a man writes even a good oration, much more that far higher thing a
good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or
anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall throw in some
hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the
occasion surely for a passage of zeugma.” He writes as the spirit moves
him, and as the way of art leads. One could wish, in reading Wilson, for
another Sir Thomas, to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the
Chaucerists and the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too
much at once: and lucky are we if we often, or even sometimes, get so
bold a striking out into new paths for a true end as we find in this
_Art of Rhetoric_.
-----
Footnote 208:
One may regret “sparple” and “disparple,” which are good and
picturesque Englishings of _e_(s)_parpiller_. The forms “spar_k_le”
and “dispar_k_le,” which seem to have been commoner, are no loss, as
being equivocal.
-----
Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is
perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of
innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the
verge of crotchet. [Sidenote: _Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and
anti-preciosity._] He was a spelling and pronouncing reformer both in
Greek and English; and, classical scholar and teacher as he was, he
seems to have fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering
of words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work
of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of
the main and most influential sources of the double stream of tendency
observable in Wilson himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on
the one hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the formation
of a generally useful and practicable English style, and on the other to
insist that neither from classical nor from any other sources should
English be adulterated by “inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,[209] of
any kind—that is to say, by archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses,
fished up as it were from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply
and naturally taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What
Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the
kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a dread that is to say, and
a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “uncontented care to write
better than he could.”[210] And it must be obvious that this sharply
formulated censure is itself a critical _point de repère_ of the
greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the
greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period,
beginning a few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old
man’s lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care,” which
still reached something better than content. But if, at this early
period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigorous but
somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English had been bid and let
sprawl simply at its pleasure, the consequences could not but have been
disastrous.
-----
Footnote 209:
Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been a
catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s
version of Jovius (1546), &c.
Footnote 210:
Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian concerning
Julius Florus (_v. supra_, i. 313).
-----
This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in Ascham’s
_Schoolmaster_,[211] is quite a _locus_ in its kind. [Sidenote: _His
criticism of Sallust._] It is not of the justest, for the prepossession
of the sentence quoted above (which stands in the forefront of it)
colours it all through. It has funny little scholastic lapses in logic,
such as the attempt to apply the old brocard _Orator est vir bonus
dicendi peritus_ to the disadvantage of Sallust, as compared not only
with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of morality. It would have been
pleasant to observe the countenances of Fausta and Servilia if this had
been argued in their joint presence. And the dislike of Thucydides, to
which a disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven, argues a
literary palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the
supposed causes of the faults of Sallust’s style, when, having sown his
wild oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his vocabulary from Cato
and Varro, and his method from Thucydides himself, is an exceedingly
ingenious piece of critical pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it
shows us a stage of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond
anything that classical or mediæval times can show. The other great
“place” of Cheke’s writing occurs in his letter[212] to Hoby on that
learned knight’s translation of Castiglione, with its solemn judgment
(the author, though but in middle age, was ill, and in fact almost
dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue should be written
clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues,
wherein if we take no heed betimes, ever borrowing and never paying, she
shall be fain to keep house as a bankrupt.” The analogy, of course, is a
false one:—there is no need to pay, nor possibility of payment, any more
than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the repayment of the tribute it
draws from others, or than a sturdy plant need dread bankruptcy because
it owes nourishment to earth, and air, and the rain of heaven. But once
more the position is a definite, and not a wholly untenable, critical
position: and Cheke shows himself here as at once engineer and captain
of it.
-----
Footnote 211:
Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.
Footnote 212:
This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just cited, p.
5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.
-----
The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question,
the always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of
_Toxophilus_ and _The Schoolmaster_ himself.[213] [Sidenote: _Ascham._]
His positive achievements in English literature do not here directly
concern us; nor does the debate between those who regard him as a
Euphuist before Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief
example of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I confess
myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know what the former
mean. But it is with what Ascham thought as a critic, not with what he
did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on this there is no
reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion. Ascham’s critical
position and opinions are clear, not only from his two famous and
pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in his
letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the
classics to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university,
where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century,
taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more
attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.[214]
-----
Footnote 213:
For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be
bettered. But for our purposes the _Letters_ are also needed; and
these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the
_Works_, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.
Footnote 214:
_Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses
in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo
Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium
utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere
mihi videbatur_—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth
reading.
-----
[Sidenote: _His patriotism._]
The _Toxophilus_ itself is a critical document in parts, both for the
initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the
English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of
the proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters
accompanying the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as
for one of those hits at Romance which were characteristic of
Renaissance scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected
in very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily
turn to the _Schoolmaster_ for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical
_ethos_, and we find it.
A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concerning it (of
which more presently), and the above-mentioned contempt or even horror
of romance—these are the worst things to be noted here. [Sidenote: _His
horror of Romance_,] All these are connected with a wider critical
heresy, which is prevalent in England to this day, and which emerges
most interestingly in this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is
the valuing of examples, and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not
according to their perfection on their own artistic standards, not
according to the quantity or quality of artistic pleasure which they are
fitted to give; but according to certain principles—patriotic,
political, ethical, or theological—which the critic holds or does not
hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those proper—or, at
least, inseparably accidental—to the human intellect, is of course
perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is, as we have seen, rife in
Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and there is no doubt that the
devotion of the Renaissance to the greatest of Greek philosophers and
prosemen, to the most entertaining of Greek biographers and moralists,
had not a little to do with its reappearance, though the struggle of the
Reformation, and the national jealousies which this struggle bred or
helped, had more. But no one has given more notable examples of it than
Ascham by his attack on “books of feigned chivalry,” in
_Toxophilus_,[215] and his well-known censure of the _Morte d’Arthur_ in
_The Schoolmaster_.[216]
-----
Footnote 215:
P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at monasticism.
Footnote 216:
P. 80, ed. Arber.
-----
Than this book there was, at Ascham’s date, no more exquisite example of
English prose in existence. There is not to this day a book, either in
prose or in verse, which has more of the true Romantic charm. [Sidenote:
_and of the_ Morte d’Arthur.] There are few better instances anywhere of
subtly combined construction of story than are to be found in some of
its parts; and, to a catholic judgment, which busies itself with the
matter and spirit of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler
temper of mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of
sternness and sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,”
that “for all these things God shall bring us into judgment,” or which
display more accomplished patterns of man and sweeter examples of woman.
Yet Ascham (and he had read the book) saw in it nothing but “open
manslaughter and bold bawdry.”
Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery—which occupies itself more
reasonably with Italian _novelle_, and the translations of them into
English—Ascham’s criticism is of a piece with that of the whole school
in all but a very few points. He differed with Wilson, and with most of
the scholars of his time, on the subject of translation, which he
rightly enough regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite
incapable of giving any literary equivalent for the original. He agreed
both with Wilson and with Cheke as to the impropriety of adulterating
English with any foreign tongue, ancient or modern. He was, all the
same, an exceedingly fervent Ciceronian and devotee of the golden age of
Latin. And when we come in one[217] of his letters to Sturm on the name
of Pigna (_v. supra_, p. 62), the rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems
to be established a contact, of the most interesting, between English
and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might have expected) no
allusion to Pigna’s view of the despised romances is even hinted: it is
his dealing with the _aureolum libellum_ of Horace that Ascham has read,
his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles that he wishes to read.
-----
Footnote 217:
Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189.
The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect, particularly
literary.
-----
Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting for the
moment his moral “craze,” we can perceive in him a tolerably distinct
ideal of English prose, which he has only not illustrated by actual
criticism of the reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty.
[Sidenote: _His general critical attitude to Prose_,] This prose is to
be fashioned with what may be excusably called a kind of squint—looking
partly at Latin and Greek construction and partly at English vernacular
usage. It does not seem that, great as was his reverence for Cheke, he
was bitten by Cheke’s mania for absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear
to have gone to the extreme of Latimer and Latimer’s admirer, Wilson, in
caring to mingle merely familiar speech with his ordered vernacular. But
he went some way in this direction: he was by no means proof against
that Delilah of alliteration which, like a sort of fetch or ghost of the
older alliterative prosody, bewitched the mid-sixteenth-century verse
and prose of England, and had not lost hold on Spenser himself. And he
had belief in certain simple Figures of the antithetic and parallel
kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster—as even being dead he
spoke—to English literature; and his example and his precepts together
tended to establish a chastened, moderately classical, pattern of
writing, which in the next generation produced the admirable English
prose of Hooker, and was not without influence on the less accomplished,
but more germinal and protreptic, style of Jonson.
We must praise him less when we come to poetry. [Sidenote: _and to
Poetry._] The history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme
in England, which practically supplies our earliest subject of purely
critical debate, is a very curious one, and may—perhaps must—be
considered from more points of view than one, before it is rightly and
completely understood. At first sight it looks like mere mid-summer
madness—the work of some Puck of literature—if not even as the incursion
into the calm domains of scholarship and criticism of that popular
_delirium tremens_, which has been often illustrated in politics.
Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful consideration, will
discover some excuses for it, as well as much method in it. But it must
be regarded long, and examined carefully, before the real fact is
discovered—the fact that, mischievous and absurd as it was in itself,
unpardonable as are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at
this time of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent
“distemper”—a necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English
prosody and English criticism.
Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as universal,
cause of the craze was the profound Renaissance admiration for the
classics, it was inevitable that something of the kind should make its
appearance in most European countries. [Sidenote: _The craze for
Classical Metres._] But other and counteracting causes prevented it from
assuming, in any of them, anything like the importance that it attained
in England. Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary
innovation of the time, had been first attempted in Italy;[218] but the
established and impregnable supremacy of forms like the Sonnet, the
Canzone, the _ottava_ and _terza rima_, put rhyme out of real danger
there. They were attempted in France.[219] But French had for centuries
possessed a perfectly well-defined system of prosody, adapted and
adequate to the needs and nature of the language. And, moreover, the
singularly _atonic_ quality of this language, its want not only of the
remotest approach to quantity but even of any decided accent, made the
experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was in English,
but all but impossible. Spanish was following Italian, and did not want
to follow anything else: and German was not in case to compete.
-----
Footnote 218:
_V. supra_, p. 46.
Footnote 219:
_V. supra_, p. 127.
-----
With English the patient was very much more predisposed to the disease.
[Sidenote: _Special wants of English Prosody._] Not only two, but
practically three, different systems of prosody, which were really to
some extent opposed to each other, and might well seem more opposed than
they actually were, disputed, in practice, the not too fertile or
flourishing field of English poetry. There was the true Chaucerian
system of blended English prosody, the legitimate representative of the
same composite influences which have moulded English language, and which
had been slowly developed through the half-chaotic beginnings of Middle
English verse, and then with almost premature suddenness perfected up to
a certain stage by Chaucer himself. [Sidenote: _Its kinds:_
(1)_Chaucerian._] This system combined—though not yet in perfect
freedom—the strict syllabic foot-division of the French with the
syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce a system of syllabic
equivalence similar in nature to, if not yet fully in practice freer
than, that of the Greek Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable
variety of metres, the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and
decasyllable, with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally,
combined in pairs or arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate
forms. But—by a historic accident which has even yet to be rather taken
as found than fully explained—nobody for more than a hundred years had
been able to produce really good regular[220] poetry in Southern English
by this metre, and certain changes in pronunciation and
vocabulary—especially the disuse of the final vocalised _e_—were putting
greater and greater difficulties in the way of its practice.
-----
Footnote 220:
There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad,
carol, and what not.
-----
Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either genuine—that
is to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed, but rhythmed nearer to
the anapæstic form than to any other—or allied with rhyme, and sometimes
formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. [Sidenote: _(2)
Alliterative._] This, which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no
one quite knows how or where, apparently in the North, and which had
maintained a vigorous though rather artificial life during the
fifteenth, had not wholly died out, being represented partly by the
ballad metre, by doggerel twelves, fourteeners, and other long shambling
lines, and by a still lively tendency towards alliteration itself, both
in metred verse and in prose. Latterly, during Ascham’s own youth, a
sort of _rapprochement_ between these two had made the fourteeners and
Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very general favourites; but had
only managed to communicate to them a sort of lolloping amble, very
grievous and sickening to the delicate ear.
[Sidenote: (3) _Italianated._]
Thirdly, and in close connection with this combination, Wyatt, Surrey,
and other poets had, by imitating Italian models, especially in the
sonnet, striven to raise, to bind together, to infuse with energy and
stiffen with backbone, the ungainly shambling body of English verse: and
Surrey, again following the Italians, had tried, with some success, the
unrhymed decasyllable soon to be so famous as blank verse.
Now critical observation at the time might survey this field with view
as extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be far from satisfied
with the crops produced. [Sidenote: _Deficiencies of all three._] To
represent the first system there was nobody but Chaucer, who, great and
greatly admired as he was, was separated from the men of 1550 by a
period of time almost as long as that which separates us from Pope, and
by a much greater gulf of pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write
like Chaucer—unless the Chaucerian _Chorizontes_ are right in
attributing _The Court of Love_ to this time, in which case there was
some one who could write very much like Chaucer indeed. There was no
Langland, and nobody who could write in the least like Langland. In
sheer despair, men of talent like Skelton, when they were not
Chaucerising heavily, were indulging (of course with more dulcet
intervals now and then) in mere wild gambades of doggerel.
But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style of poets of
such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was. Yet it must be remembered
that Wyatt and Surrey themselves are, after all, poets of more promise
than performance; that their promise itself looks much more promising to
us, seeing as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need
have done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart
Protestants and stout Englishmen feared and loathed the Italianation of
anything English; and lastly, that even the prosody of Wyatt and Surrey
is, in a very high degree, experimental, tentative, incomplete. We
laugh, or are disgusted, at the twists and tortures applied by the
hexametrists to our poor mother tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost
as awkward constraints on her.
It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying things,
and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned
for help to those classics which were the general teachers and helpers
of the time. [Sidenote: _The temptations of Criticism in this respect._]
There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had attained his year
of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest man of letters for some
fifteen hundred years at least, which contained the germ of a warning.
But it is not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends
had seen Trissino’s translation of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_; and, if any
had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante’s
generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any man of
the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half madness to
examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and decide
what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody had been
good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should any of
these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for both?
And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek and
Latin _did_ provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as
distinguished from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be
quite safely followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected
without loss and danger for English. It was when they went further, and
endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on English,
that they fell.
Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which
might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display
that combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too
often undervalued glory of English criticism. [Sidenote: _Its
adventurers: Ascham himself._] Ascham himself—besotted as he is with
wrath[221] against “our rude beggarly rhyming,” confident as he is that
the doggerel of his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln—
“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—
exhibits[222] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of
versifying as either Greek or Latin—yet saw[223] that “our English
tongue doth not well receive the nature of _Carmen Heroicum_, because
_dactylus_, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found in English.”
Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the “Waler”—to buck under an
English rider, and either throw him altogether, or force the alteration
of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent dactylics in English—the
verses of Kingsley’s _Andromeda_—are not really dactylic-hexameters at
all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong _anacrusis_ at
the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And with
this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical head), that
of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic,
coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be
done; and it was done, or at least attempted.
-----
Footnote 221:
It is curious that, in this very _début_ of English criticism, the
incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged
makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured
soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père
Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths
in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with
swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude
multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul
wrong way,” &c.
Footnote 222:
_Schoolmaster_, _ed. cit._, p. 73. Ascham actually _quotes_ the Greek
and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s stuff to be
made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other!
Footnote 223:
Ibid., p. 145.
-----
When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly know. Ascham
observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhyming beginneth not now of
any newfangle singularity, but hath been long been misliked, and that of
men of greatest learning and deepest judgment.”[224] [Sidenote: _Watson
and Drant._] We all think that the persons who agree with us are men of
great learning and deep judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But
apparently the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that
study of the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at
Oxford, passed thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so busily in
Ascham’s own college, St John’s. Thomas Watson,[225] the Bishop of
Lincoln, above referred to, was Master of the College; Ascham himself,
it is hardly necessary to say, was a fellow of it. And still descending
in the collegiate hierarchy, it was an undergraduate of St John’s,
Thomas Drant, who somewhat later drew up rules for Anglo-Classic
versifying—rules that occupied Spenser and Harvey, with the result of
producing some interesting letters and some very deplorable doggerel.
Drant seems to have been the “legislator of Parnassus” to the
innovators; but we have little work of his, and that little does not
bear on the special subject.
-----
Footnote 224:
P. 147. The extraordinary confusion of mind of the time is illustrated
by Ascham’s sheltering himself behind Quintilian!
Footnote 225:
Not to be confounded with Thomas Watson, the author of the
_Hecatompathia_, who came later, and was an Oxford man.
-----
Mischievous craze as it was, however,[226] it had the merit of turning
the attention of Englishmen to really critical study of poetry, and it
appears, more or less, as the _motif_ of most of the group of critical
writings, from Gascoigne’s _Notes of Instruction_ to Daniel’s _Defence
of Rhyme_, which we shall now discuss.
-----
Footnote 226:
Some authorities have been much too mild towards it. For instance, the
late Mr Henry Morley, who says, “Thomas Drant, of course, did not
suppose that his rules were sufficient.” This is charitable, but
outside, or rather against, the evidence.
-----
In the most interesting little treatise[227] which heads or
initials[228] the now goodly roll of books in English criticism, George
Gascoigne, though he was himself a Cambridge man, does not make any
reference to the craze. [Sidenote: _Gascoigne._] The tract was written
at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo Donati. It is exceedingly
short; but as full of matter, and very good matter, as need be. In duty
bound Gascoigne begins with insistence on fine invention, without which
neither “thundering in rym ram ruff, quoth my master Chaucer,” nor
“rolling in pleasant words,” nor “abounding in apt vocables,” will
suffice. But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and obvious
expressions,[229] suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great
literary question of the time, Prosody.
-----
Footnote 227:
_Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme
in English_, ed. Arber (with _The Steel Glass_, &c.), pp. 31-41,
London, 1868. Originally in the 4to edition of Gascoigne’s _Poems_
(London, 1575). Mr Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to Ronsard.
Footnote 228:
The observations of Ascham, Wilson, and the others being incidental
merely.
Footnote 229:
“If I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I would
neither praise her crystal eye nor her cherry lip.”
-----
He begins his attack by the modest and half-apologetic request, “This
may seem a presumptuous order,” that, whatever the verse chosen be, it
be regular, and not wobbling backwards and forwards between twelve and
fourteen syllables on no principle. [Sidenote: _His_ Notes of
Instruction.] Then he enjoins the maintenance of regular and usual
accent or quantity; and in so doing insists on a standard in regard to
which not merely Wyatt and Surrey earlier, but even Spenser later, were
much less scrupulous. “Treasure,” he says, you must use with the first
syllable long and the second short: you must not make it “treasùre.” And
then he makes a very curious observation:—
“Commonly nowadays in English rhymes, for I dare not call them English
verses, we use none other order but a foot of two syllables,” to wit,
the Iamb. “We have,” he says, “in other times used other kinds of
metres,” as
"No wight | in the world | that wealth | can attain,"[230]
(_i.e._, anapæsts), while “our Father Chaucer had used the same liberty
in feet and measures that the Latinists do use,” that is to say,
syllabic equivalence of two shorts to a long. And he laments the tyranny
of the Iamb; but says, “we must take the ford as we find it.”
-----
Footnote 230:
Gascoigne does not use this division, or ¯ and ˘ but ´ and ` for long
and short, ~ (circumflex) for common, and indented lines
([dissyllabic] and [trisyllabic]) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic foot
arrangements.
-----
Then, after some particular cautions,—a renewed one as to quantifying
words aright—“understànd,” not “undérstand,” &c., as to using as many
monosyllables as possible (it is amusing to read this and remember the
opposite caution of Pope),—he comes to rhyme, and warns his scholar
against rhyme without reason. Alliteration is to be moderate: you must
not “hunt a letter to death.” Unusual words are to be employed carefully
and with a definite purpose to “draw attentive reading.” Be clear and
sensible.[231] Keep English order, and invert substantive and adjective
seldom and cautiously. Be moderate in the use also of that “shrewd
fellow, poetical licence,” who actually reads "hea|ven" for
"heavn"![232]
-----
Footnote 231:
“For the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse
that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted horse.”
Footnote 232:
See Mitford, _Harmony of Language_, p. 105, who thinks the licence
just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the pronunciation in
one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest thinks the
_dis_-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary disagreement!
-----
As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious. “The pause,”
he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an octosyllable, at the
fourth syllable in a “verse of ten,” at the sixth (or middle again) of
an Alexandrine, and at the eighth in a fourteener. But it is at the
discretion of the writer in Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the
pause be till the end of the line”—and this liberty will assuredly draw
to more.
Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades, sonnets,
Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter’s measure,” of twelve
and fourteen alternately, to which his own contemporaries were so
unfortunately addicted. You must “finish the sentence and meaning at the
end of every staff”: and (by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind
of rhyme called riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in
his Canterbury tales, and in divers other delectable and light
enterprises.” It is good for “a merry tale,” Rhyme royal for a “grave
discourse,” Ballads and Sonnets for love-poems, &c., and it would be
best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter’s measure for Psalms and hymns.
And so he makes an end, “doubting his own ignorance.”
The chief points about this really capital booklet are as
follows:—Gascoigne’s recognition of the importance of overhauling
English Prosody; his good sense on the matter of the cæsura, and of
Chaucer’s adoption of the principles of equivalenced scansion; his
acknowledgment with regret of the impoverishment which, in the sterility
of the mid-sixteenth century before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting
from the tyranny of the iamb; the shrewdness of his general remarks;
and, last but not least, his entire silence about the new versifying,
the “Dranting of Verses.” [Sidenote: _Their capital value._] It is
possible (for though he was at Cambridge he seems to admit that he did
not acquire any great scholarship there) that he had not come into
contact with any one who took interest in this: but it is improbable
that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry, unsicklied by
Harvey’s pedantry, and not misled by Spenser’s classical enthusiasm.
At this time, however, or not long after—the _Notes_ must have been
written between 1572 and 1575, and the correspondence of Spenser and
Harvey actually appeared in 1579—these other persons were thinking a
great deal about the classical metres. The _Five Letters_ (“Three” and
“Two”[233]—not to be confused with the _Four Letters_ which Harvey
issued long afterwards about Greene) are full of the subject, and of
poetical criticism generally. They, together with the controversy which
arose over Gosson’s _School of Abuse_, and which indirectly produced
Sidney’s _Apology for Poetry_, make the years 1579-1580 as notable in
the history of English criticism as the appearances of _Euphues_ and
_The Shepherd’s Calendar_ make them in that of creative literature.
-----
Footnote 233:
See Grosart’s _Works of Gabriel Harvey_, vol. i. pp. 6-150. Parts will
be found in the Globe edition of Spenser, pp. 706-710.
-----
Spenser’s first letter informs Harvey that “they [Sidney and Dyer] have
proclaimed in their ἀρειωπάγῳ[234] [the literary _cénacle_ of Leicester
House] a general surceasing and silence of bald rhymers, and also of the
very best too: instead whereof they have, by the authority of their
whole Senate, prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of English
syllables for English verse, having had thereof already great practice,
and drawn me to their faction.” [Sidenote: _Spenser and Harvey._] And
later, “I am more in love with English versifying than with rhyming,
which I should have done long since if I would have followed your
counsel.” He hints, however, gently, that Harvey’s own verses (these
coterie writers always keep the name “verses” for their hybrid
abortions) once or twice “make a breach in Master Drant’s rules.” Which
was, of course, a very dreadful thing, only to be “condoned _tanto
poetæ_.” He requites Harvey with a few Iambics, which he “dare warrant
precisely perfect for the feet, and varying not one inch from the Rule.”
And then follows the well-known piece beginning—
“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,”
where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as infelicitous
as the verse.
-----
Footnote 234:
I am not responsible for the eccentricities of this form.
-----
Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a polite correction;
and his reply is a proper donnish setting-down of a clever but
presumptuous youth. He respects the Areopagus—indeed they were persons
of worship, and Harvey was a _roturier_—more than Spenser can or will
suppose, and he likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they
were Spenser’s own after all, and such as no man but Spenser could have
written in their foolish kind) more than Spenser “can or will easily
believe.” But—and then follows much reviewing in the now stale
hole-picking kind, which has long been abandoned, save by the
descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and a lofty protestation that
“myself never saw your gorbellied master’s rules, nor heard of them
before.”
The Three Letters which follow[235] are distributed in subject between
an Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake for us) and the
hexameters. They open with a letter from Spenser, in which he broaches
the main question, “Whether our English accent will endure the
Hexameter?” and doubts. Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his
own—
“See ye the blindfoldèd pretty god, that feathered archer,” &c.,
and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant,
indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The
first part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second,
“A Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.
-----
Footnote 235:
In order of composition, not of publication.
-----
This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the
name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author
has set about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that
Sidney and Dyer, “the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have
begun to help forward “the exchange of barbarous and balductum[236]
rhymes with artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be
much better than Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the _Schoolmaster_. He
would like (as should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and
Precepts will probably not be very different; but he will take time
before drafting them finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before
framing a standard English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including
Prosody), a standard orthography must first be agreed upon. And he
suggests that “we beginners” (this from the author of these truly
“barbarous and balductum” antics to the author of the _Faerie Queene_ is
distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and Ennius, of
setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George Bilchaunger,” in very
doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at Spenser’s “See
ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the same kind,
which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any
of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of
Stanyhurst—
“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell!
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”
with yet another—
“Since _Galateo_[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”
He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice
elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some
further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of
Spenser’s own “emblems” in the _Calendar_, he turns to Spenser himself,
whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous
genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He
proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in _The Dying
Pelican_, is certainly, or in the _Dreams_, possibly, lost. After which
he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the
_Faerie Queene_, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he
now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As
for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s _Nine
Comedies_ [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene
is to the _Orlando_, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to
overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words,
“If so be the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses,
and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say,
and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once,
and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!”
Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and
recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they
be modest and fear Nemesis.
-----
Footnote 236:
This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good
example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness
by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him;
and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his _Virgil_.
Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (_vide_ Mr Arber’s Reprint in the
_English Scholars Library_, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly
to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English
literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has
some method in its madness.
Footnote 237:
La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.
-----
After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and
shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five
hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words
by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second
syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as
“Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and
coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he
winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone
worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of
Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives
are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound
doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin
farewell to _“mea domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”_, let
us leave Gabriel in charity.[238]
-----
Footnote 238:
The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the
Camden Society’s _Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey_, touch literary
matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the
later (1592) _Four Letters_, the embroidery of railing at the dead
Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary
canvas.
-----
[Sidenote: _The Puritan attack on Poetry._]
Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so
satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English
earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy,
to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which
chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now
come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly
transcending form.
Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always
the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about
their private history and character. [Sidenote: _Gosson._] What disgust,
what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper
and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind
there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair
scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing,
and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and
denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works
of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or
“Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is
why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.
Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have
fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s
_School of Abuse_,[239] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled
_Reply_,[240] and the famous _Defence of Poesy_ or _Apology for
Poetry_[241] which Sidney (to whom Gosson had rashly dedicated his book)
almost certainly intended as a counterblast, though either out of scorn,
as Spenser hints, or (more probably from what we know of him) out of
amiable and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult, he
takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.
-----
Footnote 239:
Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent
_Apology_. I wish he had added the _Ephemerides of Phialo_ which
accompanied the _Apology_, and the _Plays Confuted_ of three years
later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add
something to the controversy.
Footnote 240:
Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in
_Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets_ (London, 1892).
Footnote 241:
Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868;
Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.
-----
_The School of Abuse_ (which is written in such a style as almost to
out-Euphuise the contemporary _Euphues_ itself) is critical wholly from
the moral side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or
possible, state of poetry. [Sidenote: The School of Abuse.] There are
even, the author says, some good plays, including at least one of his
own; but the whole of ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of
modern) is infected by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and
nearly the whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the
theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical with those
which Puritan teachers had for some years past been using in sermon and
treatise. But outside of the moral and religious line he does not step:
he is solely occupied with the lies and the licence of poets and
players.
Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it _may_ be the
_Honest Excuses_ to which Gosson refers as having been published against
him) is almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little
personal invective. [Sidenote: _Lodge’s_ Reply.] Lodge strings together
all the classical names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show
that Poetry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even the
theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any independent
justification of them as good ones, especially from the purely literary
point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—though interesting as critical work
from the associate of great creators in drama, himself a delightful
minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction—is
merely one of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence
to an attack, logically as unreal though actually dangerous. The
charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa[242] at
their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the sincere but
pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in all
countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the
measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet
them with weapons of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is
in its accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in
England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because the
defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was
being provided by one of themselves in the shape of _The Faerie Queene_.
-----
Footnote 242:
_V. supra_, p. 28.
-----
Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more
importance. [Sidenote: _Sidney’s_ Apology for Poetry.] It is not free
from faults—in fact, it has often been pointed out that some of Sidney’s
doctrines, if they had been accepted, would have made the best efforts
of Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which
more presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows
himself able, as Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic,
instead of a peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of
merely stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority
indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he does not
give exclusive attention to it.
His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence,
not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in
extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident
that he would have, in his _mimesis_, a quality of imagination which
Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic.
And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions
possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order,
justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all
the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[243]
-----
Footnote 243:
Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn,
are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes
them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older
writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr
Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on
the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and
Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver
shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in
no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his
_attitude_ is very different from theirs as a whole, and already
significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.
-----
It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the
_Apology_, though the indirect references are fairly clear. [Sidenote:
_Abstract of it._] Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian
manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous
Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt
horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and
recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that
officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a
defence of _his_ office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the
earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod,
in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and
Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy,
Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the
philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost
against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and
he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales,
Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay,
further, did not the Romans call a poet _vates_, a “prophet”? and, by
presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some
may think,[244] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What
do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a
_maker_. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the
poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it
not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition
with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.
-----
Footnote 244:
Savonarola, _v. sup._, p. 20.
-----
The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,”
and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and
improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. These
classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic, comic,
&c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in,
“for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical
inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed
but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And
again, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet.” Xenophon and
Heliodorus were both poets in prose.
Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then
by parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or
mistress-knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and
politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against
poetry at some length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is
_philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_ than history, is affirmed
chiefly on the odd ground of poetical justice,—the right always
triumphing in poetry though not in fact. Instances of the moral and
political uses of poetry follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy,
tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended; and it is in the
eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about _Chevy Chase_[245]
occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right
to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although
repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,”
he argues that if they _were_ inseparable,[246] verse is the most
excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to the abuses of
poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away the use, as is
proved by a great number of stock examples.
-----
Footnote 245:
“I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of
Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a
trumpet.”
Footnote 246:
“As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”
-----
Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad
enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering
his time. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ is good; so is Surrey; and _The
Shepherd’s Calendar_ “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic
language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has
it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From
this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of
those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all
our tragedies except _Gorboduc_, and still more on our mongrel
tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are
neglected even in _Gorboduc_, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he
proceeds (unconscious how cool the _reductio ad absurdum_ will leave us)
to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the
other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same
place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster,
and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two
hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification,
which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to
be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to
Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits _two_ styles, ancient
and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on
“number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both
sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like
almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne
partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a
very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous,
half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent
title of a rhymer.”
The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically,
can hardly be exaggerated. [Sidenote: _Its minor shortcomings_] It
exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the
first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a
stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the
great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he
even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of
the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely
traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some
modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said,
and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against
Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the _Calendar_, few would
refuse to grant. But Theocritus _did_ use dialect: it would not in the
least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what
has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the
matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s”
annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that
Englishmen’s reluctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English
language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and
no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title
of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.
It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about
the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze
against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of
ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His
remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.
There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not
inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy.
[Sidenote: _and major heresies._] In both the authority of the ancients
must again bear good part of the blame, but in both he has additional
excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least
not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis that verse _were_ necessary to
poetry, though he does not think it is. He is quite sure that verse is
anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As for the plays, there is still more
excuse for him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point;
and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side—at least in
English. Spanish had indeed already made the experiment of tragi-comic
and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think any of the best Spanish
examples had yet appeared, and there is great difference between the two
theatres. In English itself not one single great or even good play
certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from what we have
of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy
construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of
clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors
and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed
upon classical and Italian literature. [Sidenote: _The excuses of
both,_] And it is noteworthy that even _Gorboduc_, with all its
regularity and “Senecation,” does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least
some of its defects. He is here, as elsewhere,—as indeed
throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in the position of a
man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and observations,
confronted with a stage of creative production but just improving from a
very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as against new
ones which had as yet had no success.
And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of
his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. [Sidenote:
_and their ample compensation._] That “moving of his heart as with a
trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the
motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the
_Faerie Queene_, that was to give us _Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_. What
though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the
moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into
a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a
body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body _is_
art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come
without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style;
but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be
the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the _afflatus_, the glow; and they are
here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once
more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as
regards both Italian and French.
In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English
criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s _afflatus_, but all
showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method,
and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to
know, for more than a century. [Sidenote: _King James’s_ Reulis and
Cautelis.] These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”)
_Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie_,
1585; William Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poesie_, next year; and the
anonymous _Arte of English Poesie_, which appeared in 1589, and which
(on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually
attributed to George Puttenham.[248]
-----
Footnote 247:
It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well
known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was
never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.
Footnote 248:
All three are included in Mr. Arber’s _Reprints_, where the desirable,
or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly
found.
-----
The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than its
authorship. It was attached to James’s _Essays of a Prentice in the
Divine Art_, of which it gives some rules: it shows that Buchanan had
taken pains with his pupil; and it also exhibits that slightly
scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means unreal, shrewdness and acumen
which distinguished the British Solomon in his happier moments. It is
characteristic that James is not in the least afraid of the charge of
attending to mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without any rhetorical
exordium into what he calls “just colours”—do not rhyme on the same
syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables only, do not let
your first or last word exceed two or three syllables at most. This
dread of polysyllables, so curious to us, was very common at the time:
it was one of the things from which Shakespeare’s silent sovereignty
delivered us by such touches of spell-dissolving mastery as
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”
Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the iamb;
while he very oddly gives the word “foot” to the syllable, not the
combination of syllables; and lays down the entirely arbitrary rule that
the number of “feet”—_i.e._, syllables—must be even, not odd. There is
to be a sharp section (“cæsura”) in the middle of every line, long or
short; and the difference of long, short, and “indifferent” (common)
feet or syllables is dwelt upon, with its influence of “flowing,” as the
King calls rhythm. Cautions on diction follow, and some against
commonplaces, which look as if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a
suggestion confirmed elsewhere.[249] Invention is briefly touched; and
the tract finishes with a short account of the kinds of verse:
“rhyme”—_i.e._, the heroic couplet, “quhilk servis onely for lang
historieis”; a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed _aabaabbab_;
_ottava rima_, which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which he
calls “Troilus verse”; “rouncifals,” or “tumbling verse” (doggerel
alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; “common” verse (octosyllable
couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse,” &c.
-----
Footnote 249:
It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of
Gascoigne.
-----
The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an honest,
and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with
special reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short
day, but which had been specially affected—not to say specially
disorganised—by the revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth
century. Probably it was the study of French (where the iamb had long
been the only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gascoigne,
induced James to extend that crippling limitation to English; and the
same influence may be seen in his insistence on the hard-and-fast
section. These things (the latter of which at least rather endeared him
to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but they express the
genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some order on the
shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We
find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dissyllabic feet
and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for the Royal
prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of English
poetry at the time when he wrote.
-----
Footnote 250:
Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient
stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.
-----
One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence of
the root of the matter in poetry. [Sidenote: _Webbe’s_ Discourse.] There
is more of this root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in
the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except
that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of
_Tancred and Gismund_) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard
of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some
rather dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable
classical exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that
Horace came after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same
time as Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply
interested in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new
poet,” “our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever
lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to knowledge,
absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read.
It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that we meet with in English;
for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after
date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather
expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate
preference.
It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol
(but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge
men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them, he was
bitten with “the new versifying.” [Sidenote: _Slight in knowledge,_] It
was rather his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have taken
very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance of
English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew him
through the references of Chaucer and others: though three editions of
the _Confessio_—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—were in print in his
time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously vague, and almost
limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has, what must seem to
most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of discovering “good proportion
of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate, though he reproves him
for dealing with “superstitious and odd matters.” That he thinks _Piers
Plowman_ later than Lydgate is unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had
evidently read it—indeed the book, from its kinship in parts to the
Protestant, not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan
tastes, and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a
third. But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have
seen that observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of
rhyme.” What Webbe here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear
deliberate meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to
say that Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense,
that if “quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, and that
he can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For
Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the old
Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer, Golding, &c.,
and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday in words which would be
adequate for Sackville (who is not named), and hardly too low for
Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately ranked with Spenser
himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not great shame to Webbe.
If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the “ragged rout of rakehell
rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he specifies nobody; and his
depreciation is only the defect which almost necessarily accompanies the
quality of his enthusiasm.
-----
Footnote 251:
Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves exception perhaps
best.
Footnote 252:
The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly to seek in
English now than, _teste_ Porson, they were a century ago in
Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely done; and of
course some Englishmen have followed the Germans. Lydgate himself knew
better, though some of the shorter poems attributed to him are
metrically, as well as in other ways, not contemptible.
-----
His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne, Sidney,
and King James. [Sidenote: _but enthusiastic,_] After a dedication (not
more than excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard, there is a curious
preface to “The Noble Poets of England,” who, if they had been inclined
to be censorious, might have replied that Master Webbe, while
complimenting them, went about to show that the objects of his
compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and
is lamented of many, that, while all other studies are used eagerly,
only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.” We have “as sharp and
quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks and Romans: our tongue is
neither coarse nor harsh, as she has already shown. All that is wanted
is “some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying”: either in
imitation of Greeks and Latins, or with necessary alterations. So, if
the Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine cogitations”, and
“run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something
might, perhaps, be done.
[Sidenote: _if uncritical,_]
The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological definition of
poetry, as “making,” and the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but
almost immediately digresses into praise of our late famous English poet
who wrote the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ and a wish to see his “English Poet”
(mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is
succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English historical
sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh laudation
of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry (especially from
the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds, &c.; and it is to
be observed that, though he several times cites Aristotle, he leans much
more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations from him and other Latins.
He then proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the
_Æneid_, with large citations both from the original and from Phaer’s
translation, after which he returns once more to Spenser, and holds him
up as at least the equal of Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the _Calendar_
is practically his theme all through, though he diverges from and
embroiders upon it. Then, after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and
mentioning a translation of his own of the _Georgics_, which has got
into the hands of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great
rhyme-question, to which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than
once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced,
from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master,
and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres, always
illustrated, where possible, from the _Calendar_. Still harking back
again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have been
effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after
him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and Latin
forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly
correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a
tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with English
to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do:
Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash enough
to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s first and
second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful
“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”
It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag
of poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus of Horace’s
rules, gathered not merely out of the _Ep. ad Pisones_ but elsewhere,
and an “epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will happen
when “the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes
the piece.
-----
Footnote 253:
_V. infra_, p. 354.
-----
[Sidenote: _in appreciation._]
On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more, we could have
better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion
invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English
criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for
poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately
erudite, but intensely _interested_ in matters literary, and especially
in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as
were presented to it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes,
and encouraged in those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity,
pedantry, and bad taste, but by its very love of letters. Average
dispositions of this kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active
life—very much for the good of the nation—or—not at all for its
good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to
the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which
let him have due honour.
Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has
some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in
comparison with Webbe. [Sidenote: _Puttenham’s (?)_ Art of English
Poesie.] In poetical faculty there is very little to choose between
them—the abundant specimens of his own powers, which the author or _The
Art of English Poesie_ gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of
one of the works referred to, _Partheniades_), deserve the gibes they
receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John
Harington (_v. infra_). On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of
that engaging enthusiasm which atones for so much in his contemporary.
But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it
need not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe,
considered as a critic. _The Art of English Poesy_, which, as has been
said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which, from
some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun, before it, and
which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a man well
advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable in range
and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible erudition, and
no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It was
unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having
been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born
_cir._ 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of
Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes,
not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of
Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from
valueless.
-----
Footnote 254:
The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly put, in
Mr Arber’s _Introduction_. The first attribution is in Bolton (_v.
infra_) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not
quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who
has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons
of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s,
and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship is
well known.
-----
The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the _Ancren Riwle_ would say)
into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and “Of
Ornament.” [Sidenote: _Its erudition._] It begins, as usual, with
observations on the words poet and maker, references to the ancients,
&c.; but this exordium, which is fitly written in a plain but useful and
agreeable style, is commendably short. The writer lays it down, with
reasons, that there may be an Art of English as of Latin and Greek
poetry; but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at large” as
to poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often
seen.[255] Indeed we must lay our account with the almost certain fact
that all writers of this period had seen Sidney’s _Defence_ at least in
MS. or had heard of it. He comes closer to business with his remarks on
the irreption of rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better
knowledge of leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than
Webbe, but even than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the
question—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what reputation
poets were with princes of old, and how they be now contemptible
(wherein Puttenham shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with modern
European literature), and then turns to the subject or matter of poesy
and the forms thereof, handling the latter at great length, and with a
fair sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to _English_
poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go behind the late
fourteenth century, he shows rather more knowledge than Webbe and (not
without slips here and elsewhere) far more comparative judgment. It
must, however, be admitted that, engaging as is his description of Sir
Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” he does
not show to advantage in the patronising glance in passing at “that
other gentleman who wrote the late _Shepherd’s Calendar_,” contrasted
with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose Muse easily
surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which it may please her Majesty
to employ her pen.” But here the allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory
of later days can never wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend,
the curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and
interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote
about Gloriana.
-----
Footnote 255:
Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes
this as well as other things in his fling at the _Art_.
-----
The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham includes
almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff,
stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence,
situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and
proportion in figure. [Sidenote: _Systematic arrangement_] On most of
these heads he speaks more or less in accordance with his fellows
(though he very noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or
condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect
the “new versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his
chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge,
&c., which he himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the
Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject.
About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had glanced
at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and
scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young
makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, _and to the
intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit_,”[257] he
“will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate
sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any
other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite at home
in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet—classical feet—in
the usual rhymed English verse.
-----
Footnote 256:
Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the
book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben
Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a
large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this
and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition.
Footnote 257:
“Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though,
with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its
little ways rather well.
-----
The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and is
evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure.
[Sidenote: _and exuberant indulgence in Figures._] It is called “Of
Ornament,” but practically deals with the whole question of _lexis_ or
style, so that it is at least common to Rhetoric and Poetics. In one
respect, too, it belongs more specially to the former, in that it
contains the most elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found,
up to its time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied
with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein Puttenham
(sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his printer) ransacks the
Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with explanations and examples)
of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded and followed by more
general remarks, of which some account must be given.
Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general, Puttenham
proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament, not merely may
but ought to be couched in something more than a conversational style.
This added grace must be given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures.
On diction he has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly
commending the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not
provincial speech, or that of seaports, or of universities, or in other
ways merely technical. “The usual speech of the Court and that of London
and the shires lying about London, within ten miles and not much above”
is his norm. There is also a noteworthy and very early reference to
English dictionaries, and a cautious section on neologisms introduced
from other tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a
constant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual
subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.
The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite
comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished,
Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main
principle of ornament, which he calls _Decorum_ or “Decency,” dividing
and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction,
delivery, and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a
profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather
oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter
of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and
ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.
We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two
champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme _v._
'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great
here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if
representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan
critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the adjective
great before Dryden.
The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory
matter[258] of his translation of the _Orlando_, which contains the gibe
at Puttenham above referred to. [Sidenote: _Minors: Harington, Meres,
Webster, Bolton, &c._] It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney, from
whom, however, Harington differs in allowing more scope to allegorical
interpretation. Then comes Francis Meres, whose _Palladis Tamia_[259]
(1598) is to be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us
our one real document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is
quite childish in the critical characterisation which it not
uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s equally famous, and universally
known, epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface
to _The White Devil_ (1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight
of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it
would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir
W. Vaughan in _The Golden Grove_ (1600) had earlier dealt, and
Bolton[260] in his _Hypercritica_ (1616), and Peacham in his _Complete
Gentleman_ (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding
nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe,
and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie Nicol
Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.
-----
Footnote 258:
Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to _Promos and Cassandra_
(1578) and A. Fraunce’s _Arcadian Rhetoric_ (1588) are earlier still.
The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of
English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres,
his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in
his _Conversations_, _v. infra_, p. 199.
Footnote 259:
Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, _English Garner_, ii.
94 _sq._
Footnote 260:
Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv.
204 _sq._, ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and
speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting
the _Hymns_) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can
“endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman,
Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt,
Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital,
judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.
-----
The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to
be found, without doubt, in the _Observations in the Art of English
Poesy_ of Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent _Defence of Rhyme_ of
Samuel Daniel. [Sidenote: _Campion and his_ Observations.] The former
was issued in 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more than
twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty
after the appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s _Schoolmaster_.
In the interval the true system of English prosody had put itself
practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze had never
received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate Milton: and there are
persons whom we could only name for the sake of honour, and who do not
seem to see that it is dead even yet. Both the writers mentioned were
true poets: and the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic
poet of the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who
dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the _doyen_ (except poor old
Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble
exercises in it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry
but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as far
too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw
hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that almost from the
first there had been questions of heart among the partisans of the New
Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—that the dactyl, do
what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst with an
anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an ear,
and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some
even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to
declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt
altogether against the nature of our language.” But though he was bold
so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not surmount the queer
Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the arguments against the
“barbarism” of this tell equally against Christianity, chivalry, the
English constitution, the existence of America, gunpowder,
glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of other institutions
of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any of these good
folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not
choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst,
limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was
possible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to
recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse
threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as
certainly as does the iamb itself. On the contrary he shows himself in
advance of Guest, and of most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting
tribrachs in the third and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a
trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed
secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no
verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot than an
iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much _drink up_ the
verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned
drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these
two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs,
anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming
poems, notably the famous “_Rose-Cheeked Laura_,” and the beautiful
“_Constant to None_,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English
quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has
on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take
one of Campion’s own poems (written mostly _after_ the _Observations_)
in natural rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply
comes to this—that the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better
with rhyme, and that the bad ones, while they might sometimes be
absolutely saved by the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are
always made worse by its absence.
-----
Footnote 261:
Ed. Bullen, _Works of Dr Thomas Campion_, London, 1889.
-----
In the preface of Daniel’s answering _Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy
lovers and learned professors_ [_thereof_] _within His Majesty’s
dominions_,[262] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the
“great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or
even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later.
[Sidenote: _Daniel and his_ Defence of Rhyme.] The learned gentleman to
whom it was specially written was no less a person than William Herbert,
Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no
matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair
rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have known that the craze
was nearly half a century old, and had at least not been discouraged by
his patron’s uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on
rhyming as something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of
Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his
antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor
whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have given
heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a man “of
fair parts and good reputation.” And having put himself on the best
ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and courtesy, he
does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack Campion’s
“numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have allowed of his
numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the unassailable
position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law;
Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and
certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put,
the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed
on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is
such as best consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a
truism enough perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all
critics recognise it, and its consequences, even at the present day. And
it is certain that we may search other early English critics in vain for
a frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he strides
over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages” and the like.
Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is
“an excellence added to this work of measure and harmony, far happier
than any proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an
echo of a delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of
what is delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think,
less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of
the classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not
Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had played such
havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The universality of
rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy audacity in
the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born exploders of
crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the
affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon
their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it
will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question
is begged. Who made _this_ custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it
pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it
likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot make it
otherwise. Why are we to be a mere _servum pecus_, only to imitate the
Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us.
“Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best
delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted for that
mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to mount.”
The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and very
welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and
Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not
further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of
England, and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it
such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in
the other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows,
with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine
rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in an admirable
peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily shall we find, either
in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid
good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with
wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty
or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two
generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.
-----
Footnote 262:
Chalmers’s _Poets_, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s _Works of Samuel Daniel_,
iv. 29-67.
-----
The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes
been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the
scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been
recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place
of very high honour, assigned to _The Advancement of Learning_.
[Sidenote: _Bacon._] Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert,
reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this
estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate
knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should
give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or
nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and
a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of
genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet
by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his
temperament, either towards great exaltation of letters, or towards
accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in
him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern
men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science
which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite
method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to
literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have
yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form
of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had
undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of
Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but
glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.
Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from
him very different. [Sidenote: _The_ Essays.] The Essays practically
give us nothing but the contents of that _Of Studies_, a piece too well
known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the
author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For
the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to
be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet
its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of
“study” than with all others.