Among the arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an
anonymous work.[1] The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable
to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first printed in 1589,
we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The
author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic
has often adroitly addressed "the most beautiful, or rather the beauty,
of queens;" and to illustrate that figure which he terms "the gorgeous,"
has preserved for us some of her regal verses.
Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has
formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that "this
book came into my hands with _its bare title without any author's
name_." The author himself could not have been at all concerned in
delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to
the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.
This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir
John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as
"the unknown _Godfather_, that, this last year save one (1589), set
forth a book called 'The Arte of English Poesie.'" About twelve years
afterwards, Carew, in his "Survey of Cornwall," appears to have been the
first who disclosed the writer's name as "Master Puttenham;" but this
was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605,
Camden only alludes to the writer as "the _gentleman_ who proves that
poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first
historiographers." Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his
"Hypercritica," notices "this work (_as the fame is_) of one of Queen
Elizabeth's pensioners, Puttenham." The qualifying parenthesis "as the
fame is," leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.
Who was Puttenham? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by
any contemporary. Even the baptismal name of this writer has been
subject to contradiction.[2]
In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to
himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined
ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his
prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,[3] which our mature
critic still deemed "pretty;" but, according to one of his rhetorical
technical terms, "it holds too much of the _cachemphaton_ or _foule
speech_, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense." Our author was a
travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to
have been connected with the _corps diplomatique_, for he had been
present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we
discover by coeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage
relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished
hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes:--"These and many such like
disgustings we find in men's behaviour, and specially in the courtiers
of foreign countries, _where in my youth I was brought up_, and very
well observed their manner of life and conversation; for of _mine own
country I have not made so great experience_."
This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author's history, for at
eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by "Our Eclogue
of Elpine." When he tells us that "he had not had so great experience of
his own country as of others," we may be surprised, for no contemporary
writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England,
which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which
bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of
poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of
English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all
betray a stranger's absence from home. But, what seems more
extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions,
critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own--to "our
comedy" and to "our enterlude," and has frequent illustrations drawn
from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the
singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous,
and that no contemporary has ever mentioned the name of Puttenham. How
are we to reconcile these discrepancies, and how account for these
numberless vernacular compositions, with the condition of one who was
"brought up abroad," and who had such "little experience of his own
country?" We appear to read a work composed by different persons.
The same anomalous character is attached to the work as we have
discovered concerning the writer.
This "Arte of English Poesie," which Warton observes "remained long as a
rule of criticism," and still may be consulted for its comprehensive
system, its variety of poetic topics, and its contemporary historical
anecdotes, is the work of a scholar, and evidently of a courtier. His
scholastic learning furnished the terms of his numerous figures of
rhetoric, each of which is illustrated by examples drawn from English
literature; but aware that this uncouth nomenclature might deter, as he
says, "the sort of readers to whom I write, too scholastical for our
MAKERS," as he classically calls our poets, "and more fit for clerks
than for courtiers, for whose instruction this travail is taken," our
logician was cast into the dilemma of inventing English descriptions for
these Greek rhetorical figures. We had no English name--"the rule might
be set down, but there was no convenient name to hold it in memory."
To familiarise the technical terms of rhetoric by substituting English
descriptive ones, led to a ludicrous result. The Greek term of _histeron
proteron_ was baptised the _preposterous_; these are words misplaced,
or, as our writer calls it, "in English proverb, the cart before the
horse," as one describing his landing on a strange coast said thus
_preposterously_, that is, placing before what should follow--
When we had climb'd the cliff, and were ashore.
instead of
When we had come ashore, and climb'd the cliff.
The _hipallage_ he calls _the changeling_, when changing the place of
words changes the sense; as in the phrase "come dine with me, and stay
not," turned into "come stay with me, and dine not." This change of
sense into nonsense he called "the changeling," in allusion to the
nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and substitute an
ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense!
I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of
conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the
wits of that day. _Ironia_, he calls the _dry-mock_; _sarcasmus_, the
_bitter taunt_; the Greek term _asteismus_ he calls _the merry
scoff_--it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock
scornfully comes the _micterismus_, the _fleering frumpe_, as he who
said to one to whom he gave no credit, "_No doubt, sir, of that!_" The
_antiphrasis_, or the _broad flout_, when we deride by flat
contradiction, antithetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a
black woman, "In sooth ye are a fair one!" The _charientismus_ is _the
privy nippe_, when you mock a man in a _sotto voce_; and the
_hyperbole_, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latins _dementiens_,
our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as "the
over-reacher, or the loud liar." The rhetorical figures of our critic
exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly,
all which are ingeniously illustrated by fragments of our own
literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means
common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity,
though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however
naturally, we are in fact violating, or illustrating, this heap of
rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously our _fleering
frumpes_, our _merry scoffs_, and our _privy nippes_, have been
intelligible all our days.
In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining
the poet, after the Greek, to be "a maker" or creator, drawing the verse
and the matter from his native invention,--unlike the _translator_, who
therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of
criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism.
It happened, however, that in the year following that in which "The Art
of Poetry" was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation
of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet,
he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive "versifier"
invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his "Art," by
very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most
detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of "The Art" itself
was a nullity! "All the receipts of poetry prescribed," proceeds the
enraged translator of Ariosto, "I learn out of this very book, never
breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make
poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is a _gift_
and not an _art_, because making himself and many others so cunning in
the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it."
Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the
destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with
that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which
reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric?
We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values
"the courtly trifles," which he calls "pretty devices," among the
inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of
"geometrical figures in verse," his delight in egg or oval poems,
tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse,
whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and
downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention
in "parcels of his own poetry," obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by
his intolerable "triumphals," poetical speeches for recitation; and a
series of what he calls "partheniades, or new year's gifts,"--bloated
eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could
endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some
appointment at court.
When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and
the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the
rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as
"going like a minstrel's music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my
ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both,
I wot not." And he exemplifies this lack of "good rime and good reason,
or both," by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her
infant:
Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother's own joy,
Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy;
For beauty, surpassing the azured sky,
I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.
Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are
left without any more.
In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I
discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate
poetical erudition, combined with such ineptitude of poetic taste, that
I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have
been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious
Art of English Poetry was ascribed to SIDNEY; and Wanley, in his
catalogue of the Harley Library, assigns this volume to Spenser.[4] I
lay no stress on the singular expression of Sir John Harrington,
applied to the present writer, as "the unknown _godfather_," which seems
to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without
being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at
all have been connected with that treatise of "the English poets," which
Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years
after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever
claimed this work. Manuscripts, however, we may observe, strangely
wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often
fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest
publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and
there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance
from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had
long passed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of
publication, and so partial was all literary communication.
One more mystery is involved in the authorship of this remarkable work:
first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in
hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work
during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we
cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own
writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has
furnished for us so many "parcels of his poetry," to exemplify "the
art."
If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious
writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the
most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the
mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the
work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed
and unowned.
I find it less difficult to imagine that some stray manuscript,
possibly from the relics of SIDNEY, or perhaps the lost one of SPENSER,
might have fallen into the hands of some courtly critic, or "the
Gentleman Pensioner," who inlaid it with many of his own trivialities:
the discrepancy in the ingenuity of the writing with the genius of the
writer in this combination of learning and ineptitude would thus be
accounted for; at present it may well provoke our scepticism.