England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only
broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of
minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a
few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their
posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national
poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon
after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the
sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language
was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the
masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and
who were themselves England, having history in common with their
country.
But Robert Greene was absolutely an Elizabethan—man and boy. He was born
in the year of the Queen’s accession, and died while she was dancing, an
old man of thirty-four, dropsical and horrible, full of repentance, as
were then all of his manner of life when they had an illness
sufficiently long to give them time. Greene died from too much
banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, but his sorry
death-bed gave him room for ample self-reproach, and doubtless
Christopher Marlowe also would have left a record of his repentance had
the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age than his friend’s,
been less violent. In later years Carew asked pardon, with many cries,
for the greater number of his verses; and, indeed, during these two
bright centuries you may hear, if you turn your ear that way, the loud
lamentation of poet after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals; not
a death-bed without the clamour that closed the song. It is a parting
cry, so poignant and sudden that the air rings with it even while the
succeeding singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the present.
Greene had not a little to repent of in his actions, but nothing to
retract in his songs; therefore, the reader who has not beheld his
life—his wife was left at ‘six and seven’, as he phrases it, and
certainly very forlorn—has little to do with the grief, pain, and fear
of the closing scene, and may well be content with the sweetness of the
songs. They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmonized. Without
following the fashion of using the terms of one art to describe another,
we may permit ourselves this mere imagery: the single note of music to
represent the sixteenth-century lyric, harmonics for the seventeenth,
counterpoint for the nineteenth. Greene’s famous ‘Sephestia’s Song to
Her Child’ (by far his best) is the only lyric in which so much as two
notes are to be heard; and the double string makes the sound more human.
It is not human to be single as the songs of Greene are single; the
fading of pleasure, the cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the
happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings—each thing, one at a
time, is so unaccompanied that you wonder how a primitive poet should
have had time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying thoughts
together. For it is hardly youth, hardly inexperience that this
simplicity suggests, but rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating
other conditions than those which govern an actual world of which the
poet has somewhat grown tired.
‘Sephestia’s Song’, however, has the thrill of sweetly jarring notes in
the lines that tell the parting of father and mother over their laughing
child—lines that seem to have haunted the ear, if not the mind, of Blake
in his own song of birth. Blake’s verse has a tempestuous and
threatening spiritual wildness of which Greene did not know the
language; and it is only in the leaping metre, the clamour of the rhymes
that seem striving to be heard above a deafening childish noise, that
the two songs have so much likeness.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt;
More he crowed, more we cried.
There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dandling of the child, and
you hear also the crying that the mother is seeking to still with her
recital of that late scene of sorrow—‘Weep not, my wanton’.
Next in beauty to ‘Sephestia’s Song’ comes, perhaps, ‘The Praise of
Faunia’:
Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,
Or but as mild as she is seeming so,
is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less strong, and less
masculine Shakespeare sonnet. There is sweet line after line in this
poem, and many such a phrase as ‘the morning-singer’s swelling throat’
and ‘When she sings, all singers else be still!’ But the poem is famous
chiefly, it may be guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has
a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible beauty:
O glorious sun, imagine me the west!
Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast!
Next comes that pretty song ‘Radagon in Dianam’, which is to be praised
not as a whole, but for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep a
golden sun away from a ‘valley gaudy green’, and from nymphs in white.
There never was any scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain is
cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow through, but the sense
of outer sunshine is intense and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame
blackly, as they do on such a sky. ‘Outer darkness’, by the way, is a
familiar phrase, but ‘outer sunshine’ is a presence hardly removed in
the southern summer.
This vivid impression from Greene’s poem is caused by the most careless
of verses. As a lyrist, he never leant hard upon anything; he has the
lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to sing his tunes upon
the way. So lightly is the verse given to the wind that you are apt to
read it as carelessly, and so to lose something. This Song of the
Fountain, for instance, should be read with more leisure than at a
glance it seems to merit.
Greene is dull to any reader who does not take the pains to cancel all
the conventions of the times that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure
fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy green, must be
simply forgotten; and the task is not difficult. Greene has all the good
luck by his Elizabethanism—inalienable good luck, which was neither to
be repeated by others, nor to be taken from his own head upon whom it
alighted first. We, who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need not
be wearied by those nymphs that were his—and this not because his were
best, but because his were first.
See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, wild, and dear:
Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
His wings were wet with ranging in the rain.
But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat dull, especially when
he is not at his best, because he has so little to say. There never was
a poet who said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his own
estimation, not important enough to be written for their own sake; they
were but snatches of songs in his prose writings—novels and what not;
and poems so set flying at any other time and in any other English could
not have kept their motion and their spirit so long. They never cost him
a thought; and the only sign of attention is in the versification. This
is by no means always good, but in ‘Radagon in Dianam’ it is very good
indeed; the foot is elastic and moves with a rebound.
But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take his charming
description of ‘A Shepherd and His Wife’. As though in the idleness of
an empty mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly matter for
verse—the way, for example, in which the flaps of the shepherd’s coat
were turned over. It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail
as that. But in the same poem are some lively verses about the wife
which seem not only to set her up for admiration and delight, but to
dance about her in a round when that is done.
Nor is there more in ‘The Shepherd Wife’s Song’, in which the happiest
shepherdess in Thessaly compares her love and state with those of
queens, and makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt refrain.
But ‘Fair Samela’—oftener quoted—has a weakness and listlessness that
spoil its grace; and, after this, what is left? Robert Greene was a
small poet among the minor poets; but his hour struck in the cool of the
morning, and, whatever kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic
simplicity was in his English.
‘A MODERN POETESS’
The cruel places of history are for ever emptied of their suffering
tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong
prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours
and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the
guard. Every martyrdom of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one
how sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There is no living pain
now in all the universe to continue it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or
perhaps to regret it. And if we complain that the past is not to be
revoked or undone, we might rather confess the complete consolation of
the passing of time, the undoing, the effacement, and the more than
death. It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is to be past, or
that we perceive how clean is natural oblivion; the uneasy human
retrospection stirs nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart
with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing now on earth
remembers.
The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the thing is over and done;
but it afflicts me to think of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no
trouble but in the present, and that though our minds seem to travel
into the past, in truth they do not budge; and we, prisoners of our own
moment, are fluttered with the present sympathy, and not with the
vanished sorrow, for this is not.
By far the greater number of human sufferings have been forgotten by man
as purely and freshly as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory
which is history and tradition renews the report with so much attention
as to preserve something like the dramatic unity of time. To read of
them and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to endure them.
But of others again we have the brief record that shows long hollow
spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is the
bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by our popular historians
in a short paragraph that ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the
extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style and making the page
conspicuous to childish learners.
Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, although she is not in the
catalogue of those whom he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the
Duchess of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the young Plinie,
Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’ and Lucretia Marinella, who is not
mentioned as any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a work _Dell’
excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e mancamenti degli Huomini_—with
the inferiority of these and such as these does he flatter the
surpassing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart would have made her
name too sad a sacrifice for such a train. The other ladies are
presented gaily and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but that
divided which your Grace retaines in one.’
Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when women of station were
well taught, notable for her education. Her Latin letters are still
there to attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by Mr. Philips, who
was Milton’s nephew. These secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions
are in touching disproportion with her original, immediate, and
authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp edging that a more or less
literary training gives to the natural human mind, making it aware, had
been given to hers; and she was so prepared by delicate erudition that
the loss of all she loved was complete to her, the suspense of
imprisonment inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. She lost
better than her life, for the prison ruined her reason before it
released her body, twice rifled and destitute, and dismissed it to
Westminster Abbey and the grave.
It is in her letters to her husband, and only in these, that Arabella
Stuart is perceptible as she lived. The letters of entreaty to King
James are the letters of those abject times. They declare her to be in
despair, not because of the separation from her husband and only friend,
and not because of her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of
the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence, and by reason of
the remorse and contrition of one who had disobeyed him, even
unwittingly. By these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, not
their phrases only, but, apparently, their very thoughts. Such
declarations were much more than a courtesy due to kings or the decorum
of a style in letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most grotesque
tune; those were real self-reproaches; they banished real sleep, human
sleep, afflicted real consciences, set the tears of men running, and
squandered and scattered to waste that human treasure, humility.
Lady Arabella’s remorse, as she took leave to remind the King, was
poignant for her offence in having bestowed herself in marriage _upon
the King’s permission_. He seems to have either forgotten or silently
rescinded his consent, and for this she overwhelmed herself in
professions of regret and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen
some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which, she said, had
beguiled the time ‘for her whose serious mind must invent some
relaxation’. ‘Womanish toys’, she called them, conscious of her
education, and she thanked the gentleman who was her gaoler for
consenting to present them. Her way of submission was even approved by
the tyrant. One of her letters to the King, said Montford, ‘was penned
by her in the best terms, as she can do right well. It was often read
without offence; nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with the
applause of Prince and Council.’ The best terms are of course the most
reverent. The clergy exhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping,
to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill of fear, was that
of the Bishop of Durham.
She had the heart to deny her commended letters so far as to practise
some secret disobedience, heaping up self-reproach for the vigils of her
solitude. The letters to her husband, from whom she had been parted
after but a few months of marriage, were contraband. Even in these, her
allusions to the King were most dutiful, but her husband was her theme.
‘Rachel wept,’ she wrote, ‘and would not be comforted, because her
children were no more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow, and
none else! And, therefore, God bless us from that, and I will hope well
for the rest, though I see no apparent hope.’ Her husband was ill, as
she heard from others. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am exceeding sorry to hear
that you have not been well. I am not satisfied with the reason Smith
gives for it; but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sympathy
betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a
cold. For God’s sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your body.
You may see by me what inconvenience it will bring one to; and no
fortune, I assure you, daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find
in myself; for “si nous vivons l’âge d’un veau”, as Marot says, we may,
by God’s grace, be happier than we look for, in being suffered to enjoy
ourself with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not able to live it, I,
for my part, shall think myself a pattern of misfortune, in enjoying so
great a blessing as you so little while.’
Again, she reminded him that he had not written to her ‘this good
while’. ‘You see when I am troubled, I trouble you with tedious
kindness, for so I think you will account so long a letter. But, sweet
Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with writing but when you please.
Be well, and I shall account myself happy in being your faithful and
loving wife.’
As soon as these letters were discovered the writing was stopped. Enough
was written, and enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous,
worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief, of this
unfortunate. A graver revolt against her tyrants was her escape to join
her husband in flight from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times,
tides, and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She would not save
herself without him. She was brought back, and from the new imprisonment
there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied justice by refusing
another little offering of her needlework. In her appeal to the Queen
she had entreated that the gloves she had made might be accepted ‘in
remembrance of the poor prisoner that wrought them, in hopes her royal
hands will vouchsafe to wear them, which, till I have the honour to
kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow’.
‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate creature that ever
lived prostrates itselfe at the feet of the most merciful King that ever
was.’ These are among the last ‘best terms’ that Arabella Stuart penned.
Her King and Queen and country sent her civilization into solitude,
gagged her classics, disproved her poetry, and thrust her ‘expanded
mind’ into the inner darkness.