In our last talk we entered upon that brilliant sixteenth century, within
whose first quarter three great kings held three great thrones:--Charles
V. of Spain, Francis I. of France, and Henry VIII. of England. New
questions were astir; Art--in the seats of Art--was blazing at its best:
the recent fall of Constantinople under the Turk had sent a tide of Greek
scholars, Greek art, and Greek letters flowing over Western Europe, and
drifting into the antiquated courts of Oxford and Cambridge. I spoke of
the magnificent Wolsey, and of his great university endowments; also,
of that ripe scholar, Sir Thomas More, who could not mate his religion,
or his statesmanship with the caprices of the King, and so, died by the
axe. We saw Cranmer--meaning to be good, if goodness did not call for
strength; we heard Latimer’s swift, homely speech, and saw Tyndale with
his English Testament--both these coming to grief; and we had glimpses of
John Knox shaking the pulpit with his frail hand, and shaking all Scotch
Christendom with his fearless, strident speech.
We heard the quaint psalmody of Sternhold, and the sweeter and more
heathen verse of Wyatt and of Surrey; lastly, I gave a sketch of that old
schoolmaster, Roger Ascham, who by his life, tied the reigns of Henry and
of Elizabeth together, and who taught Greek and Latin and penmanship and
Archery to that proud princess--whom we encounter now--in her high ruff,
and her piled-up head-dress, with a fair jewelled hand that puts a man’s
grip upon the sceptre.
_Elizabethan England._
Elizabeth was in her twenty-sixth year when she came to the throne,
and it was about the middle of the sixteenth century; the precise year
being 1558. The England she was to dominate so splendidly was not a
quiet England: the fierce religious controversies which had signalized
the reign of Henry VIII.--who thwacked with his kingly bludgeon both
ways and all ways--and which continued under Edward VI.--who was feebly
Protestant; and which had caught new vigor under Mary--who was arrant
and slavish Papist--had left gouts of blood and a dreadful exasperation.
Those great Religious Houses, which only a quarter of a century
before, were pleasantly embayed in so many charming valleys of Great
Britain--with their writing-rooms, their busy transcribing clerks--their
great gardens, were, most of them, despoiled--and to be seen no more.
An old Venetian Ambassador,[85] writing to the Seigneury in those days,
says--“London itself is disfigured by the ruins of a multitude of
Churches and Monasteries which once belonged to Friars and Nuns.” Piers
Plowman, long before, had attacked the sins growing up in the pleasant
Abbey Courts; Chaucer had echoed the ridicule in his Abbot riding to
Canterbury, with jingling trappings: Gower had repeated the assault in
his _Vox Clamantis_, and Skelton had turned his ragged rhymes into the
same current of satire. But all would have availed nothing except the
arrogant Henry VIII. had set his foot upon them, and crushed them out.
There was a wild justice in it--if not an orderly one. The spoils went to
fill the Royal coffers; many of those beautiful properties were bestowed
upon favorites; many princely estates are still held in England, by title
tracing back to those days of spoliation--a fact which will be called to
mind, I suspect--with unction, in case of any great social revolution
in that country. Under Mary, some of these estates had been restored
to Church dignitaries; but the restoration had not been general: and
Elizabeth could not if she would, and would not if she could, sanction
any further restitution.
She was Protestant--but rather from policy than any heartiness of belief.
It did not grieve her one whit, that her teacher, Roger Ascham, had been
private secretary to bloody Mary: the lukewarmness of her great minister,
Lord Burleigh, did not disturb her; she always kept wax tapers burning
by a crucifix in her private chamber; a pretty rosary gave her no shock;
but she _was_ shocked at the marriage of any member of the priesthood,
always. In fact, if Spanish bigotry had not forced her into a resolute
antagonism of Rome, I think history would have been in doubt whether to
count her most a Lutheran, or most a Roman.
Yet she made the Papists smoke for it--as grimly as ever her sister Mary
did the Protestants--if they stood one whit in the way of England’s grasp
on power.
_Personality of the Queen._
I think our friend Mr. Froude, whose history we all read, is a
little unfair toward Queen Bess, as he was a little over-fair, and
white-wash-i-ly disposed in the case of Henry VIII.: both tendencies
being attributable to a mania this shrewd historian has--for unripping
and oversetting established forms of belief. I think that he not only
bears with a greedy zeal upon her too commonly manifest selfishness and
heartlessness, but that he enjoys putting little vicious dabs of bad
color upon her picture--as when he says, “she spat, and swore like a
trooper.” Indeed it would seem that this clever biographer had carried
a good deal of his fondness for “vicious dabs” in portraiture into his
more recent _post-mortem_ exhibits; as if it were his duty and pleasure
to hang out all sorts of soiled linen, in his office of Clean-Scrubber:
Yet, I wish to speak with all respect of the distinguished
historian--whose vigor is conspicuous--whose industry is remarkable,
whose crisp sentences are delightful, but whose accuracy is not of the
surest; and whose conscience does, I think, sometimes go lame--under
strain of his high, rhetorical canter.
The authority for all most damnatory statements with respect to the
private life of the Queen, rests upon those Spanish Relations--so minute
as to be suspicious--if they were not also so savagely bitter as to
twist everything to the discredit of the Protestant Sovereign. Signor
Soranzo--the Venetian ambassador (whom Froude does not cite--but who had
equal opportunities of observation with the Spanish informer), says of
Elizabeth (in a report--not written for publication, but lying for years
in the archives of Venice): “Such an air of dignified majesty pervades
all her actions that no one can fail to judge her a queen. She is a good
Greek and Latin scholar; and beside her native tongue she speaks Latin,
French, Spanish, and Italian _benissimo_--and her manners are very
modest and affable.”[86]
I talk thus much--and may talk more--about the personality of Queen
Elizabeth, because she must be counted--in a certain not very remote
sense--one of the forces that went to endow what is called the English
Literature of her day--so instructed was she; so full of talent; so
keen-sighted; so exact--a most extraordinary woman. We must not think her
greatness was factitious, and attributable to her only because she was
a queen. There could be no greater mistake. She would have been great
if she had been a shoemaker’s daughter; I do not mean that she would
have rode a white horse at Tilbury, and made the nations shake: but she
would have bound more shoes, and bound them better, and looked sharper
after the affairs of her household than any cobbler’s wife in the land.
Elizabeth would have made a wonderful post-mistress--a splendid head of
a school--with perhaps a little too large use of the ferule: and she
would have had her favorites, and shown it; but she would have lifted
her pupils’ thoughts into a high range of endeavor; she would have
made an atmosphere of intellectual ambition about her; she would have
struck fire from flinty souls; and so she did in her court: She inspired
work--inspired imagination; may we not say that she inspired genius.
That auburn hair of hers (I suppose we should have called it red, if her
name had been Abigail) made an aureole, around which wit coruscated by a
kind of electric affinity. It was counted worth toil to have the honor
of laying a poem at her gracious feet, who was so royally a Queen--whose
life, and power, and will and culture, made up a quadrature of poems.
_Burleigh and Others._
And who was there of literary significance about Elizabeth in those early
days of her reign? Roger Ascham was still doling out his sagacious talk,
and his good precepts; but he was not a force--only what we might call
a good creature. There was Sackville[87] (afterward the elegant Earl
of Dorset); he was in his prime then, and had very likely written his
portion of the _Mirror for Magistrates_--a fairish poetic history of
great unfortunate people--completed afterward by other poets, but hardly
read nowadays.
Old Tusser,[88] too--the farmer-poet--lived in these times; an Essex man,
of about the same age as Ascham, but who probably never came nearer to
the court than to sing in the choir of old St. Paul’s. He had University
experience, which, if it did not help his farming, on the banks of the
Stour, did, doubtless, enable him to equip his somewhat prosy poems with
such classic authentication and such directness and simplicities as
gave to his _Pointes of Husbandrie_ very great vogue. Many rhyming saws
about farming, still current among old-fashioned country-folk, trace
back to Master Tusser, who lived and farmed successively (tradition
says not very successfully) at Ipswich, Dereham, and Norwich. His will,
however, published in these later times, shows him to have been a man of
considerable means.
Then there was Holinshed,[89] who, though the date of his birth is
uncertain, must have been of fair working age now--a homely, honest,
simple-hearted chronicler (somewhat thievish, as all the old chroniclers
were) but whose name is specially worth keeping in mind, because he--in
all probability--supplied Shakespeare’s principal historic reading, and
furnished the crude material, afterward beaten out into those plaques
of gold, which we call Shakespeare’s Historic Plays. Therefore, we
must always, I think, treat Holinshed with respect. Next, there was
the great Lord Burleigh,[90] the chief minister and adviser of the
Queen--whom she set great store by: the only man she allowed to sit in
her presence; and indeed he was something heavy, both in mind and in
person; but far-sighted, honest, keen, cautious, timid--making his nod
count more than most men’s words, and in great exigencies standing up
for the right, even against the caprices of the sovereign. Whoever goes
to Stamford in England should not fail to run out--a mile away only--to
the princely place called Burleigh House (now the property of the Marquis
of Exeter) which was the home of this minister of Elizabeth’s--built
out of his savings, and equipped now with such paintings, such gardens,
such magnificent avenues of oak, such great sweeps of velvet lawn, such
herds of loitering deer as make it one of the show-places of England.
Well--this sober-sided, cautious Burleigh (you will get a short, but good
glimpse of him in Scott’s tragic tale of Kenilworth) wrote a book--a sort
of earlier Chesterfield’s Letters, made up of advices for his son Robert
Cecil, who was cousin, and in early life, rival of the great Francis
Bacon. I will take out a tid-bit from this book, that you may see how
this famous Lord Burleigh talked to his son:
“When it shall please God to bring thee to man’s estate”--he
says--“use great Providence, and circumspection in choosing
thy wife: For from thence will spring all thy future good and
evil. And it is an action of life--like unto a stratagem of
War, wherein a man can err but once. If thy estate be good,
match near home and at leisure: if weak--far off, and quickly.
Inquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have
been inclined in their youth. Choose not a base, and uncomely
creature, altogether for Wealth; for it will cause contempt in
others, and loathing in thee: Neither make choice of a fool,
for she will be thy continual disgrace, and it will irk thee to
hear her talk.”
_A Group of Great Names._
But the greater names which went to illustrate with their splendor the
times of Elizabeth, only began to come to people’s knowledge after she
had been upon the throne some twenty years.
Spenser was a boy of five, when she came to power: John Lilly, the author
of _Euphues_ which has given us the word _euphuistic_, and which provoked
abundant caricatures, of more or less fairness--was born the same year
with Spenser; Sir Philip Sidney a year later; Sir Walter Raleigh a
year earlier (1553); Richard Hooker, the author of the _Ecclesiastical
Polity_, in 1554; Lord Bacon in 1561; Shakespeare in 1564. These are
great names to stand so thickly strewed over ten or twelve years of
time. I do not name them, because I lay great stress on special dates:
For my own part, I find them hard things to keep in mind--except I group
them thus--and I think a man or woman can work and worry at worthier
particularities than these. But when Elizabeth had been twenty years a
Queen, and was in the prime of her womanly powers--six years after the
slaughter of St. Bartholomew--when the first English colony had just
been planted in Virginia, and Sir Francis Drake was coasting up and down
the shores of California; when Shakespeare was but a lad of fourteen, and
poaching (if he ever did poach there--which is doubtful) in Charlecote
Park; when Francis Bacon was seventeen, and was studying in Paris--Philip
Sidney was twenty-four; in the ripeness of his young manhood, and just
returned from Holland, he was making love--vainly as it proved--to the
famous and the ill-fated Penelope Devereaux.
Richard Hooker--of the same age, was teaching Hebrew in the University of
Oxford, and had not yet made that unfortunate London marriage (tho’ very
near it) by which he was yoked with one whom old Izaak Walton--charitable
as the old angler was--describes as a silly, clownish woman, and withal a
perfect Xantippe.
The circumstances which led to this awkward marriage show so well the
child-like simplicity of this excellent man, that they are worth noting.
He had come up to London, and was housed where preachers were wont to
go; and it being foul weather, and he thoroughly wetted, was behoven to
the hostess for dry clothes, and such other attentions as made him look
upon her as a special Providence, who could advise and care for him in
all things: So, he accepted her proffer to him of her own daughter, who
proved to him quite another sort of Providence, and a grievous thorn
in the side; and when his friends, on visits to his homestead in after
years, found the author of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_--rocking the
cradle, or minding the sheep, or looking after the kettles, and expressed
sympathy--“My dear fellows,” said he--“if Saints have usually a double
share in the miseries of this Life, I, that am none, ought not to repine
at what my Wise Creator hath appointed for me, but labor (as indeed I do
daily) to submit mine to his will and possess my soul in patience and
peace.”
I don’t know if any of our parish will care to read the _Ecclesiastical
Polity_; but if you have courage thereto, you will find in this old
master of sound and cumbrous English prose, passages of rare eloquence,
and many turns of expression, which for their winning grace, their
aptitude, their quality of fastening themselves upon the mind, are not
overmatched by those of any Elizabethan writer. His theology is old and
rankly conservative; but he shows throughout a beautiful reverence for
that all-embracing Law, “whose seat (as he says) is the Bosom of God, and
whose voice is the Harmony of the World.”[91]
_Edmund Spenser._
As for Edmund Spenser, he was a year older at this date--twenty-five:
he had taken his master’s degree at Cambridge and had just returned to
London from a visit to the North of England, where he had encountered
some fair damsel to whom he had been paying weary and vain suit, and whom
he had embalmed in his _Shepherd’s Calendar_ (just then being made ready
for the press) under the name of Rosalind.
“Ah, faithless Rosalind, and voyd of grace,
That art the root of all this ruthful woe
[My] teares would make the hardest flint to flow;”
and his tears keep a-drip through a great many of those charming
eclogues--called the _Shepherd’s Calendar_. Some of the commentators on
Spenser have queried--gravely--whether he ever forgot this Rosalind; and
whether the occurrence of the name and certain woe-worn words in some
madrigal of later years did not show a wound unhealed and bleeding. We
are all at liberty to guess, and I am inclined to doubt here. I think he
was equal to forgetting this Rosalind before the ink of the _Shepherd’s
Calendar_ was fairly dry. He loved dreams and fed on dreams; and I
suspect enjoyed the dream of his woe more than he ever suffered from a
sting of rebuff.
Indeed, much as we must all admire his poetic fervor and fancies, I
do not find in him traces of heroic mould;--easily friendly rather
than firmly so;--full of an effusive piety, but not coming in way of
martyrdom for faith’s sake;--a tenderly contemplative man, loving and
sensing beauty in the same sure and abounding way in which Turner has
sense of color--exhaustless in his stock of brilliant and ingenious
imagery--running to similes as mountain rills run to rivers; a courtier
withal--honeyed and sometimes fulsome; a richly presentable man
(if portraits may be trusted), with a well-trimmed face, a cautious
face--dare I say--almost a smirking face;--the face of a self-contained
man who thinks allowably well of his parts, and is determined to make
the most of them. And in the brows over the fine eyes there is a bulging
out--where phrenologists place the bump of language--that shows where
his forte lies: No such word-master had been heard to sing since the
days when Chaucer sung. He is deeply read in Chaucer too; and read in
all--worth reading--who came between. His lingual aptitudes are amazing.
He can tear words in tatters, and he can string them rhythmically in
all shapes; he makes his own law in language, as he grows heated in
his work; twists old phrases out of shape; makes new ones; binds them
together; tosses them as he will to the changing level of his thought:
so that whereas one may go to Chaucer, in points of language, as to an
authority--one goes to Spenser as to a mine of graceful and euphonious
phrases: but the authority is wanting--or, at least, is not so safe. He
makes uses for words which no analogy and no good order can recognize.
And his new words are not so much the product of keen, shrewd search
after what will fullest and strongest express a feeling or a thought,
or give color to epithet, as they are the luxuriant outcropping of a
tropical genius for language, which delights in abundant forms, and makes
them with an easy show of its own fecundity, or for the chance purpose of
filling a line, or meting out the bounds of an orderly prosody.
He came up to London, as I said, about the year 1578, at the invitation
of a prig of a classmate, who makes him known to Philip Sidney: Sidney
is the very man to recognize and appreciate the tender beauty of those
woful plaints in the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, and invites the poet down
to Penshurst, that charming home of the Sidneys, in Kent. There, such
interest is made for him that he is appointed to a secretaryship in
Ireland, where the Queen’s lieutenants are stamping out revolt. Spenser
sees much of this fiery work; and its blaze reddens some of the pages of
the _Faery Queen_. In the distribution of spoils, after the Irish revolt
was put down, the poet has bestowed upon him, amongst other plums, some
three thousand acres of wild land, with Kilcolman Castle, which stands
upon a valley spur of this domain. This castle is represented as an
uninteresting fortress--like Johnnie Armstrong’s tower in Scotland--upon
the borders of a small lake or mere, and the landscape--stretching in
unlovely waste around it--savage and low and tame. Yet he finds rich
rural pictures there--this idealist and dreamer: let him see only so much
of sky as comes between the roofs of a city alley, and he will pluck out
of it a multitude of twinkling stars; let him look upon a rood square of
brown grass-land, and he will set it alight with scores of daisies and of
primroses.
_The Faery Queen._
And it is in this easy way he plants the men and women, the hags and
demons, the wizards and dragons that figure in the phantasmagoria of the
_Faery Queen_; they come and go like twilight shadows; they have no root
of realism.
There is reason to believe that the first cantos of this poem were
blocked out in his mind before leaving England; perhaps the scheme had
been talked over with his friend Sidney; in any event, it is quite
certain that they underwent elaboration at Kilcolman Castle, and some
portions doubtless took color from the dreary days of rapine and of war
he saw there. I will not ask if you have read the _Faery Queen_: I fear
that a great many dishonest speeches are made on that score; I am afraid
that I equivocated myself in youngish days; but now I will be honest
in saying--I never read it through continuously and of set purpose; I
have tried it--on winter nights, and gone to sleep in my chair: I have
tried it, under trees in summer, and have gone to sleep on the turf: I
have tried it, in the first blush of a spring morning, and have gone--to
breakfast.
Yet there are many who enjoy it intensely and continuously: Mr.
Saintsbury says, courageously, that it is the only long poem he honestly
wishes were longer. It is certainly full of idealism; it is full of sweet
fancies; it is rich in dragonly horrors; it is crammed with exquisite
harmonies. But--its tenderer heroines are so shadowy, you cannot bind
them to your heart; nay, you can scarce follow them with your eyes: Now,
you catch a strain which seems to carry a sweet womanly image of flesh
and blood--of heartiness and warmth. But--at the turning of a page--his
wealth of words so enwraps her in glowing epithets, that she fades on
your vision to a mere iridescence and a creature of Cloud-land.
“Her face so faire, as flesh it seemèd not,
But Heavenly Portrait of bright angels hew,
Clear as the skye, withouten blame or blot
Thro’ goodly mixture of Complexion’s dew!
And in her cheeks, the Vermeil red did shew,
Like Roses in a bed of Lillies shed,
The which ambrosial odors from them threw,
And gazers sense, with double pleasure fed,
Hable to heal the sick, and to revive the dead!
“In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame
Kindled above at the Heavenly Makers Light,
And darted fiery beams out of the same
So passing persant and so wondrous bright,
That quite bereaved the rash beholders sight.
In them the blinded God--his lustful fire
To kindle--oft assay’d, but had no might,
For with dred Majesty, and awful ire
She broke his wanton darts, and quenchèd base desire!
“Upon her eyelids many Graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,
Working Belgardes and amorous Retrate,
And everie one her with a grace endows,
And everie one, with meekness to her bowes;
So glorious mirror of Celestial Grace
And soveraigne moniment of mortal vowes,
How shall frail pen describe her Heavenly face
For feare--thro’ want of skill, her beauty to disgrace?
“So faire, and thousand times more faire
She seem’d--when she, presented was, to sight.
And was y-clad, for heat of scorching aire
All in a silken _Camus_, lilly white,
Purfled upon, with many a folded plight
Which all above besprinkled was throughout
With golden Aygulets, that glistered bright
Like twinckling starres, and all the skirt about
Was hemmed with golden fringe, …”
and so on, by dozens, by scores, by hundreds--delicate, mellifluous
stanzas--fair ladies and brazen-scaled dragons, lions and fleecy lambs,
sweet purling brooks and horrors of Pandemonium, story grafted upon
story, and dreams grafted upon these, and still flowing on--canto after
canto--until the worldlings are tempted to exclaim, “When will he stop?”
It is an exclamation that a good many lesser men than Spenser have
tempted--in class-rooms, in lecture-rooms, and in pulpits. And I am
wicked enough to think that if a third had been shorn away by the poet
from that over-full and over-epitheted poem of the _Faery Queen_, it
would have reached farther, and come nearer to more minds and hearts. But
who--save the master--shall ever put the shears into that dainty broidery
where gorgeous flowers lie enmeshed in page-long tangles, and where
wanton tendrils of words enlace and tie together whole platoons of verse?
In brief, the Poem is a great, cumbrous, beautiful, bewildering,
meandering Allegory, in which he assigns to every Virtue a Knight to be
ensampler and defender of the same, and puts these Knights to battle with
all the vices represented by elfin hags, or scaled dragons, or beautiful
women; and so the battles rage and the storms beat. But we lose sight of
his moral in the smoke of the conflict. The skeleton of his ethics is
overlaid with the wallets of fair flesh, and with splendid trappings; his
abounding figures gallop away with the logic; his roses cumber all his
corn-ground. There are no passages of condensed meaning, or of wondrous
intuition that give one pause, and that stick by us like a burr. There is
a symphonious clatter of hammers upon golden-headed tacks, but no such
pounding blow as drives a big nail home.
All this is the criticism of a matter-of-fact man, who perhaps has no
right of utterance--as if one without knowledge of music should criticise
its cumulated triumphs. Many a man can enjoy a burst of balladry--of
little vagrant songs--who is crushed and bored by the pretty tangles
and symphonies of an opera. Spenser was poets’ poet--not people’s poet;
hardly can be till people are steeped in that refinement, that poetic
sensibility, which only poets are supposed to possess. And I am rather
unpleasantly conscious that I may offend intense lovers of this great
singer by such mention of him: painfully conscious, too, that it may
have its source (as Saintsbury assures us must be the case) in a poetic
inaptitude to give largest and adequate relish to the tender harmonies
and the mythical reaches of his sweetly burdened song. But shall I not be
honest?
Yet Spenser is never ribald, never vulgar, rarely indelicate, even
measured by modern standards: He always has a welcoming word for honesty,
and for bravery, and, I think, the welcomest word of all for Love, which
he counts, as so many young people do, the chiefest duty of man.
Once upon a time, there comes to see Spenser in his Kilcolman home--that
daring adventurer, that roving knight, Sir Walter Raleigh--who is so
well taught, so elegant, so brave that he can make the bright eyes even
of Queen Bess twinkle again, with the courtliness of his adulation; he
comes, I say, to see Spenser;--for he too has a grant of some forty
thousand acres carved out of that ever-wretched and misgoverned Ireland:
and Spenser, to entertain his friend, reads somewhat of the _Faery
Queene_ (not more than one canto I suspect), and Sir Walter locks arms
with the poet, and carries him off to London, and presents him to the
Queen; and Spenser weaves subtle, honeyed flattery for this great
_Gloriana_; and his book is printed; and the Queen smiles on him, and
gives him her jewelled hand to kiss, and a pension of £50 a year, which
the stout old Burleigh thinks too much; and which Spenser, and poets all,
think too beggarly small. There are little poems that come after this,
commemorating this trip to Court, and Raleigh’s hobnobbing with him--
“Amongst the coolly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla’s shore
[Where]--he piped--I sung--
And when he sung, I piped,
By chaunge of tunes, each making other merry.”
Spenser has found, too, a new _Rosalind_ over amid the wilds of Ireland,
to whom he addresses a cluster of gushing _Amoretti_; and she becomes
eventually his bride, and calls out what seems to me that charmingest of
all his poems--the _Epithalamium_. You will excuse my reciting a tender
little lovely picture from it:--
“Behold, whiles she before the Altar stands
Hearing the Holy Priest that to her speaks,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands.
How the red roses flush up in her cheeks,
And the pure snow, with goodly vermeil stain
Like crimson dyed in grain:
That even the Angels, which continually
About the sacred altar do remain,
Forget the service, and about her fly,
Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair,
The more they on it stare--
But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground,
Are governèd with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound.
Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand?
The pledge of all our band?
Sing, ye Sweet Angels, Allelujah sing!
That all the woods may answer, and your echos ring!”
To my mind the gracious humanity--the exquisite naturalness of this is
worth an ocean of cloying prettinesses about _Gloriana_ and _Britomart_.
Not very many years after this--just how many we cannot say--comes
the great tragedy of his life: A new Irish rebellion (that of Tyrone)
sends up its tide of fire and blood around his home of Kilcolman; his
crops, his barns, his cattle, his poor babe[92]--the last born--all are
smothered, and consumed away in that fiery wrack and ruin. He makes
his way broken-hearted to London again; his old welcome as an adulator
of the Queen is at an end; Raleigh is not actively helpful; Sidney is
dead; he has some cheap lodging almost under the shadow of Westminster:
He is sick, maimed in body and in soul; other accounts--not yet wholly
discredited--represent him as miserably poor; bread, even, hard to come
by; my Lord of Essex--a new patron--sends him a few guineas; and the poor
poet murmurs--too late--too late!--and so he dies (1599). How glad we
should have been to help him, had we been living in that time, and all
this tale of suffering had been true;--so we think: and yet, ten to one
we should have said--“Poor fellow, what a pity!”--and buttoned up our
pockets, as we do now.
_Philip Sidney._
Meantime what has become of that Philip Sidney[93] who flashed upon us
under the eyes of Elizabeth at the age of twenty-four? You know him as
the chivalric soldier and the model gentleman. Students and young people
all, who are under the glamour of youthful enthusiasms, are apt to have a
great fondness for Philip Sidney: But if any of my young readers chance
to be projecting an essay about that courteous gentleman--and I know
they will, if they have not already--I would counsel them to forego any
mention of the story about the dying soldier and the cup of water. It
has been cruelly overworked already. Indeed it might have been matched
in scores of cases upon the battle-fields of our own war: When the last
shattering blow comes to our poor humanity, the better nature in us does
somehow lean kindly out, in glance and in purpose. Yet Philip Sidney was
certainly a man of great kindness and full of amiabilities and courtesies.
Why, pray, should he not have been? Consider that in all his young life
he was wrapped in purple. It is no bad thing in any day to be born
eldest son of an old and wealthy and titled family of England; but it is
something more to be born eldest son of a Sidney--nephew to Leicester,
prime favorite of the Queen, cousin to the Northumberlands, the
Sutherlands, the Warwicks--heir to that old baronial pile of Penshurst,
toward which summer loiterers go now, every year, from far-away
countries--to admire its red roofs--its gray walls curtained with
ivy--its tall chimneys, that have smoked with the goodly hospitalities
of centuries--its charming wood-walks, that Ben Jonson and Spenser and
Massinger have known--its courts and parterres and terraces, where
“Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” gathered posies--its far-reaching
lovely landscape, with Penshurst church cropping out near by--blue, hazy
heights off by Tunbridge--lanes bowered with hedge-rows--wide-lying wavy,
grain-fields, and sheep feeding in the hollows of the hills. He was born
heir to all this, I say, and had the best masters, the tenderest and the
worthiest of mothers--who writes to him in this style,
“Your noble Father hath taken pains, with his own hand, to give
you in this--His Letter--so wise precepts for you to follow
with a diligent mind, as I will not withdraw your eyes from
beholding, and reverent honoring the same--no, not so long a
time as to read any letter from me: Wherefor--I only bless
you--with my desire to God to plant in you his grace, and have
always before your mind the excellent councils of my Lord, your
dear Father: Farewell, my little Philip; and, once again, the
Lord bless you!
“Your loving mother,
“MARIE SIDNEY.”
Ought not a boy, with such a mother, and Penshurst in prospect, and
cousinly relations with the Talbots and Howards and Stanleys to be
gentlemanly and amiable? Then--his great-uncle--Leicester (who is
Chancellor of the University) writes up to Oxford, where young Sidney
is reading for his degree--“Pray have my boy, Philip Sidney, who is
delicate, excused from fasting during Lent.” And there is a plot afoot
to marry this young Oxford man to Anne, daughter of that Lord Burleigh I
told you of, and there are letters about the negotiation still extant.
Would you like to hear how Lord Burleigh discusses his daughter’s affairs?
“I have been pressed,” he says, “with kind offers of my lord
of Leicester, and have accorded with him, upon articles (by
a manner of A. B. C.) without naming persons--that--if P. S.
and A. C. hereafter shall like to marry, then shall H. S.
(father of P. S.) make assurances, etc., and W. C. [that’s Lord
Burleigh] father of A. C. shall pay, etc.: What may follow,
I know not: but meanwhile P. S. and A. C. shall have full
liberty.”
What did follow was, that old Burleigh thought better of it, and married
his daughter to a bigger title--that is Lord Oxford, a learned and
elegant, but brutal man, who broke poor Anne Cecil’s heart.
Sidney, after his Oxford course, and another at Cambridge (as some
authorities say) went--as was the further mode--upon his travels:
and goes, with the same golden luck upon him, to the great house of
Walsingham, ambassador of England, in Paris. Why not be gentle? What is
to provoke? It is quite a different thing--as many another Cambridge
man knew (Spenser among them), to be gentle and bland and forbearing,
when illness seizes, when poverty pinches, when friends backslide,
when Heaven’s gates seem shut;--then, amiability and gentleness and
forbearance are indeed crowning graces, and will unlock, I think, a good
many of the doors upon the courts, where the weary shall be at rest.
Sidney is at Paris when that virago Catharine de’ Medici was lording
it over her sons, and over France;--there, too, as it chanced, through
the slaughter of St. Bartholomew’s day, from which bloody holocaust he
presently recoils, and continues his travel over the Continent, writing
very charming, practical letters to his younger brother Robert:
“You think my experience,” he says, “has grown from the good
things I have learned: but I know the only experience which I
have gotten is, to find how much I _might_ have learned and how
much indeed I have missed--for want of directing my course to
the right end and by the right means.” And again he tells him,
“not to go travel--as many people do--merely out of a tickling
humor to do as other men have done, or to talk of having been.”
He goes leisurely into Italy--is for some time at the famous University
of Padua; he is in Venice too during the great revels which were had
there in 1574, in honor of Henry III. (of France). The Piazza of San
Marco was for days and nights together a blaze of light and of splendor:
what a city to visit for this young Briton, who came accredited by
Elizabeth and by Leicester! The palaces of the Foscari and of the
Contarini would be open to him; the younger Aldus Manutius was making
imprints of the classics that would delight his eye; the temple fronts
of Palladio were in their first freshness: Did he love finer forms of
art--the great houses were rich in its trophies: the elder Palma and
Tintoretto were still at work: even the veteran Titian was carrying
his ninety-eight years with a stately stride along the Rivi of the
canal: if he loved adventure, the Venetian ladies were very beautiful,
and the masks of the Ridotto gave him the freedom of their smiles; the
escapade of Bianca Capello was a story of only yesterday; and for other
romance--the air was full of it; snatches from Tasso’s _Rinaldo_[94]
were on the lips of the gondoliers, and poetic legends lurked in every
ripple of the sea that broke upon the palace steps. It is said that
Sidney was painted in Venice by Paul Veronese; and if one is cunning
in those matters he may be able to trace the likeness of the heir of
Penshurst in some one of those who belong to the great groups of noble
men and women which the Veronese has left upon the walls of the Ducal
Palace.
In 1575 he came home, with all the polish that European courts and
European culture could give him. We may be sure that he paid dainty
compliments to the Queen--then in the full bloom of womanhood: we may
be sure that she devoured them all with a relish that her queenliness
could not wholly conceal. He won his sobriquet of “The Gentleman” in
these times; elegantly courteous; saying the right thing just when he
should say it:--perhaps too elegantly courteous--too insistent that even
a “Good-morning” should be spoken at precisely the right time, and in
the right key--too observant of the starched laws of a deportment that
chills by its own consciousness of unvarying propriety, as if--well, I
had almost said--as if he had been born in Boston. His favorite sister
meantime has married one of the Pembrokes, and has a princely place
down at Wilton, near Salisbury (now another haunt of pleasure-seekers).
Sidney was often there; and he wrote for this cherished sister his book,
or poem--(call it how we will) of _Arcadia_; writing it, as he says,
off-hand--and without re-reading--sheet by sheet, for her pleasure: I am
sorry he ever said this; it provokes hot-heads to a carelessness that
never wins results worth winning. Indeed I think Sidney put more care to
his _Arcadia_ than he confessed; though it is true, he expressed the wish
on his deathbed, that it should never be printed.
Shall I tell you anything of it--that it is an Allegory--shaped in fact
after a famous Italian poem of the same name--that few people now read
it continuously; that it requires great pluck to do so; and yet that
no one can dip into it--high or low--without finding rich euphuisms,
poetic symphonies, noble characters, dexterous experimentation in
verse--iambics, sapphics, hexameters, all interlaced with a sonorous
grandiloquence of prose--a curious medley, very fine, and _very_ dull?
When published after his death it ran through edition after edition, and
young wives were gravely cautioned not to spend too much time over that
cherished volume. His little book of the _Defence of Poesie_, which he
also wrote down at Wilton, appeals more nearly to our sympathies, and
may be counted still a good and noble argument for the Art of Poetry.
And Sidney gave proof of his skill in that art, far beyond anything in
the _Arcadia_--in some of those amatory poems under title of _Astrophel
and Stella_, which were supposed to have grown out of his fruitless love
for Penelope Devereux, to which I made early reference. I cite a single
sonnet that you may see his manner:--
“_Stella_, think not, that I by verse seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live--but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history.
If thou praise not, all other praise is shame,
Nor so ambitious am I as to frame
A nest for my young praise in laurel tree;
In truth I vow I wish not there should be
Graved in my epitaph, a Poet’s name.
Nor, if I would, could I just title make
That any laud thereof, to me should grow
Without--my plumes from other wings I take--
For nothing from _my_ wit or will doth flow
Since all my words _thy_ beauty doth indite,
And Love doth hold my hand, and _make_ me write.”
But it is, after all, more his personality than his books that draws
our attention toward him, amid that galaxy of bright spirits which is
gathering around the court of Elizabeth. In all the revels, and the
pageants of the day the eyes of thousands fasten upon his fine figure
and his noble presence. Though Scott--singularly enough--passes him by
without mention, he is down at Kenilworth, when the ambitious Leicester
turns his castle-gardens into a Paradise to welcome his sovereign. When
he goes as ambassador to Rudolph of Germany, he hangs golden blazonry
upon the walls of his house: Englishmen, everywhere, are proud of this
fine gentleman, Sidney, who can talk in so many languages, who can turn a
sonnet to a lady’s eyebrow, who can fence with the best swordsmen of any
court, who can play upon six instruments of music, who can outdance even
his Grace of Anjou. His death was in keeping with his life; it happened
in the war of the Low Countries, and was due to a brilliant piece of
bravado; he and his companions fighting (as at Balaclava in the Charge
of the Light Brigade) where there was little hope of conquest. All round
them--in front--in rear--in flank--the arquebuses and the cannon twanged
and roared. They beat down the gunners; they sabred the men-at-arms;
thrice and four times they cut red ways through the beleaguering enemy;
but at last, a cruel musket-ball came crashing through the thigh of this
brave, polished gentleman--Philip Sidney--and gave him his death-wound.
Twenty-five days he lingered, saying brave and memorable things--sending
courteous messages, as if the sheen of royalty were still upon him--doing
tender acts for those nearest him, and dying, with a great and a most
worthy calm.
We may well believe that the Queen found somewhat to wipe from her cheek
when the tale came of the death of “my Philip,” the pride of her court.
Leicester, too, must have minded it sorely: and of a surety Spenser in
his far home of Kilcolman; writing there, maybe--by the Mulla shore--his
apostrophe to Sidney’s soul, so full of his sweetness and of his
wonderful word-craft:--
“Ah me, can so Divine a thing be dead?
Ah no: it is not dead, nor can it die
But lives for aye in Blissful Paradise:
Where, like a new-born Babe, it soft doth lie
In bed of Lilies, wrapped in tender wise
And compassed all about with Roses sweet
And dainty violets, from head to feet.
There--thousand birds, all of celestial brood
To him do sweetly carol, day and night
And with strange notes--of him well understood
Lull him asleep in angelic Delight
Whilst in sweet dreams, to him presented be
Immortal beauties, which no eye may see.”
Two black palls fling their shadows on the court of Elizabeth in 1587:
Sidney died in October of 1586; and in the following February Mary
Queen of Scots was beheaded. The next year the Spanish Armada is swept
from the seas, and all England is given up to rejoicings. And as we
look back upon this period and catch its alternating light and shade
on the pages of the historians and in the lives of English poets and
statesmen, the great Queen, in her ruff and laces, and with her coronet
of jewels, seems somehow, throughout all, the central figure. We see
Raleigh the Captain of her Guard--the valiant knight, the scholar, the
ready poet--but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately
gallantries to her court: We see Sir Francis Drake, with his full beard
and bullet-head--all browned with his long voyages, from which he has
come laden with ingots of Spanish gold--swinging with his sailor-gait
into her august presence: We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now
with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his--Francis
Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen’s hand and do service for favors which
shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash,
headstrong Oxford may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the
affianced of Sidney: And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the
white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville,
had contributed the best parts to the _Mirror for Magistrates_: Richard
Hooker, too, may be there--come up from the “peace and privacy” of his
country parsonage--in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but
in the prime of his age and power, with the calm face and the severe
philosophy with which he has confronted a termagant of a wife and the
beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in
London might have been found, in that day, a young man, not much past
twenty--just up from Stratford-upon-Avon--to take his part in playing at
the Globe Theatre; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while
all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant
halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Stratford man may
be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul’s--with his chin upon his
hand--looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept
down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers
of his--only creatures of his day-dreams; yet they are to carry his
messages of wisdom into all lands and languages.
But I must shut the books where I see these figures come and go.