LATE ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETS.
It may have occurred to the reader that the words which Ben Jonson
quoted about Shakespeare, _Sufflaminandus erat_--he flowed so freely
that he needed stopping--indicate the great fault of Elizabethan and
Jacobean Literature. The authors did not know where to stop. The age
was luxuriantly rich in genius; and was over-wealthy in new ideas,
gained from Greece, Rome, France, Spain, and Italy; from the clash of
religions, the discoveries in the new world, and the re-discoveries
of the treasures of the old world. What the English poets did
not re-discover was the Greek lucidity, brevity, condensation,
and orderliness. Even in plays of Shakespeare these graces are
lacking: even Shakespeare's construction is not his strong point.
The intellectual wealth of the poets tempted them to prolixity; the
abundance of their ideas provoked them to that fashion of "conceits,"
of comparisons between the things most remote in heaven, earth, and
the world of fancy. There was a taste which reappears now and then
in literature, from early Icelandic poetry to Browning and George
Meredith, for wilful abruptness, harshness, and obscurity. But
industrious prolixity is not the fault of Donne, whom we now approach:
his error lay in harshness, obscurity, and a measureless indulgence in
conceit. Through these the light which is in him is darkened. Meanwhile
rank over-abundance, the inability to stop, renders Daniel and Drayton
and Phineas Fletcher burdensome, while Giles Fletcher crowds with
conceits and points of wit a poem on the most sacred theme. These poets
are not now commonly read, except in selections of their best things,
and such selections give no idea of their pervading faults. When we
extend our knowledge of the authors, and mark the formless character
of the age in poetry, the sudden appearance of Milton indicates as
great a miracle of genius as the existence of Chaucer, Spenser, and
Shakespeare in the throng of their contemporaries.
John Donne was born in London, in 1573. His father was an eminent
ironmonger, of a Catholic family; his mother's kin, the Heywoods, had
suffered much from Protestant persecution. One of them was the writer
of Interludes which amused the melancholy of Mary Tudor. John entered
Hart Hall, Oxford, later Magdalen Hall, in 1584, he also studied at
Cambridge, and entered Lincoln's Inn in 1592. A portrait of him in 1591
shows a young man holding the hilt of a very large rapier, and wearing
a large earring shaped as a cross. He has a look of audacity, perhaps
of sensuality, with a tinge of melancholy. He seems at this time to
have studied the controversy between Catholics and Protestants, and in
his "Epistle" (rhymed heroic couplets) we perceive that he was of no
fervent piety, but rather a doubter. His satires appear to have been
written about 1593. They are obscure, and the versification is bad,
apparently of set purpose. Often the reader is puzzled to guess how a
line is meant to be scanned, the natural rules of accent are set at
defiance, as Ben Jonson remarked. Probably Donne aimed at imitating
Persius, the obscure young Roman satirist. The satires can scarcely
be read except by curious students tracing the evolution of Donne's
thought and style.
In 1596 he sailed with Essex to the victory over Spain at Cadiz. Before
starting he wrote one of his poetical "Elegies" to a lady with whom he
had an intrigue. In 1597 he went on "the Islands Voyage" with Essex,
to capture plate ships. He experienced a tempest, was driven back to
Falmouth, wrote "The Storm," and later, in the Tropics "The Calm". The
men are roasted by the sun and bathe, then
from the sea into the ship we turn,
Like parboiled wretches, on the coals to burn.
The poems are rude in versification and exaggeration, but most vivid
are their pictures of Nature and the sea. Returning in the autumn of
1597, Donne is supposed to have travelled in Italy and Spain, if it be
not more probable that he visited these countries in 1592-1596. If Ben
Jonson rightly said that Donne wrote "all his best pieces of verse"
before he was 25, they must have been finished by 1598. They were not
printed till 1633, but circulated in manuscript.
Probably most of the pieces in his "Elegies" and "Songs and Sonnets"
were composed in his tempestuous youth. The amorous conceits in "The
Flea" are equally rich in ingenious fancies and in bad taste. "Woman's
Constancy" and many other poems have the same moral burden as
'T was last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility,--
to be constant. The sun is chidden for too early rising--
Go tell Court-huntsmen that the King will ride,--
but leave lovers undisturbed. In "The Indifferent" he brags that he
can love all sorts and conditions of women, like Lord Byron and other
amorists. He finds in himself "something like a heart," but rather
rumpled. Of a later period, when he met his future wife, may be a
charming song,
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angel's purity'
'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be.
But the Elegies address ladies of whose nature purity is no part, and
it may be admitted that the confessions do not win admiration for
Donne's taste and temper, not to mention his morals, when he wrote
them. "The Curse" on a woman, or a man who loves his mistress, far
outdoes the Epodes of Horace in cold ferocity. "The Bait" contains
remarks on the cruelty of angling which must have vexed Izaak Walton to
the heart. "Love's Deity," opening with the charmed lines
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born,
thence descends into crabbed and difficult conceits. Two songs, "The
Funeral" and "The Relic," are on a bracelet of his mistress's hair:
whoever exhumes the poet's body will find
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
These verses of Donne's disturbed and adventurous youth, poems
ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the
music as of birds' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age: nor
have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser's. Donne in youth was not
at ease with himself: he speculates too curiously. He may try to play
the sensualist, but there is a dark backward in his genius; there
are chords not in tune with mirth and pleasure. He is as unique as
Browning, as little like other poets. If his Elegies contain, as has
been supposed, the story of a love affair, it was of a nature to make
him uneasy.
In 1597 Donne became secretary of the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton,
and met his niece, Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant
of the Tower. He married her secretly at the end of 1601, and therefore
was imprisoned in the Fleet jail, in February, 1602, thanks to the
lady's angry father, who soon after forgave the young lovers.
By 1601 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or "Metempsychosis,"
the adventures of a soul "placed in most shapes,"[1] for example, in
that fabulous and mortuary weed, a mandrake, in the roe of a fish, in a
sparrow, and so forth, all to little purpose. He was unemployed, eager
for employment, given to writing long letters, and laments for deaths
in verse, and he assisted in a controversy with the Catholics.
Now come such more or less theological works as "Pseudo-Martyr,"
"Ignatius His Conclave," and "Biathanatos": the first (1610) is
addressed to the King, who finally induced Donne to take holy
orders. "Divine" poems he also wrote, but he was not anxious to be a
professional divine. Donne's conceits were daring to the border of
profanity. A visit to Paris with his patron, Sir Robert Drury, while
Mrs. Donne was about to become a mother, was marked by a telepathic
experience--Donne saw his wife, then in England, with a dead baby
in her arms. Walton says that the day of the vision was that of the
child's birth and death, but the dates do not bear out the statement.
Walton's remark that Drury sent an express messenger to England, to
inquire about Mrs. Donne, is certainly untrue.
In honour of a daughter of Drury who died young, Donne had written
two extraordinary poems: "The First Anniversary" of the decease was
published in 1611, "The Second Anniversary" was written in 1612. There
seemed reason to fear that Donne would celebrate Miss Drury, whom he
had never seen, once a year, while his life endured. The poem as a
whole is "An Anatomy, of the World, wherein, by occasion of the death
of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole
world is represented". Donne indulges in an exaggeration of hyperbole
equalled only by the ancient Irish bards who sang the feats of
Cuchulainn. For example, when Elizabeth joined the Saints
This world in that great earthquake languished,
For in a common bath of tears it bled,
an allusion to Seneca bleeding to death in a bath full of hot water.
This manner of hyperbole flourished after Donne's time, infecting
Crashaw and others,
For there's a kind of world remaining still,
as Donne admits. Poetry on the deplorable brevity of life and the
instability of things may be excellent, and that instability is the
theme of Donne, but Mistress Drury is harped upon too much, and Donne
was taking this paragon on trust:--
she whose rich eyes and breast
Gilt the West Indies and perfumed the East.
It is impossible to understand how a poet, now of the mature age of
thirty-nine, could write in this fashion if he had any humour.
"The Second Anniversary" dwelt on the incommodities of the soul in this
life, and her exaltation in the next. Donne says that the world still
has a semblance of life, as when the eyes and tongue of a decapitated
man twinkle and roll, while
He grasps his hands and he pulls up his feet.
So struggles this dead world,
without Elizabeth, whom Donne never saw! There are good lines such as
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks,
and the satiric remarks on
A spongy slack divine,
who
Drinks and sucks in th' instructions of great men.
In return for these poems Drury housed and took care of Donne and his
large family. The poet now became the adviser of the Earl of Somerset
in the hideous suit of nullity, and, when things went against Somerset,
who had done nothing for him, Donne proposed to publish his poems in "a
few copies". "I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution," and
indeed, as Donne at this moment intended to take holy orders, which
he did in January, 1615, he was wise in breaking his resolution. He
now obtained some clerical appointments, but in August, 1617, lost his
wife. There is little doubt that his grief changed him from a worldly
man into a man of heartfelt piety, the man whom Izaak Walton knew and
adored.
His "Holy Sonnets," written at this time, have some noble almost
Miltonic passages, mingled with lines that cannot be made to scan, and
with hyperbolical conceits. Thus, though
Thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.
He requests the American explorers to lend him "new seas," so that he
may drown his world in tears of penitence. He makes "yet" rhyme to
"spi_rit._". The excuse made for such things is that Donne thought
Elizabethan poetry too dulcet.
He is a poet by flashes, which are very brilliant with strange coloured
fires. He is not really so obscure as he is reckoned: he _can_ be
understood, though Ben Jonson, who "esteemed him the first poet in the
world in some things," added that "Donne from not being understood
would perish".
Donne died on March 31, 1631. His poetry, styled by Dr. Johnson
"metaphysical," exercised an influence not wholly favourable on his
successors; happily it did not affect Lovelace and Herrick.
Minor Lyrists.
In the Elizabethan age it might almost be said that every man was his
own poet. The name of poet became a term of contempt, as we learn
from Ben Jonson and other sources. Of the best lyrists we have spoken
in treating of the dramatists, of Sidney, Raleigh, and the chief
sonneteers. Another sonneteer is Thomas Watson, an Oxford man, and
allied to Spenser's circle (15571592). His "Hecatompathia" (1582)
and "Tears of Fancy" (posthumously published) are sonnets, either
informal or formal in structure; the "Hecatompathia" mainly consists of
translations from modern languages. Watson had learning and some skill,
but not much natural music in his soul.
Henry Constable, a Yorkshire man and a Catholic, may have been born
about 1562 or earlier, judging by his degree taken at Cambridge in
1580. He passed much of his life abroad, and, on his return, part of
it an the Tower, in the last years of Elizabeth. His sonnets ("Diana,"
1592-1594) are pleasing, more tunable than many sonnets of his own and
the succeeding age. Others have been exhumed from manuscript; some are
devotional.
Willoughby's "Avisa" (the sonnet sequences usually bore girls' names)
would be forgotten but for the magic initials "W. S." and allusions to
W.'s love affairs. He may have been William Shakespeare; or he may have
been Walter Smith, or William Smith, author of another such book as
"Avisa," "Chloris" (1596). With him may pair off Lynch, with "Diella,"
and Griffin with "Fidessa," love-sonneteers.
Richard Barnfield (1574-1627), an Oxford man, was fertile in 1594-1598,
publishing "The Affectionate Shepherd" (1594), "Cynthia" (1595), "The
Encomion of Lady Pecunia" (1598). The Shepherd is much too affectionate
for Christian and Northern tastes, in the style of Virgil's second
Eclogue,
that horrid one
Beginning with _formosum pastor Corydon_,
as Byron describes it. In "Cynthia" he enthusiastically admires
Spenser. If he wrote the sonnet "If Music and sweet Poetry agree,"
which appears in poems published with "Lady Pecunia," and the charming
"As it fell upon a day" (often ascribed to Shakespeare), in the
miscellany "England's Helicon," Barnfield was among the true lyrists of
his time. "Lady Pecunia" is a satire on what wealth can do, and "The
Complaint of Poetry for the death of Liberality," a satire on what it
does not usually care to do. He made experiments in English hexameters:
after the age of 24 he ceased to write or ceased to publish.
Thomas Campion (died in 1620) was, fortunately, a more persevering
poet. Though his name was hardly known to modern readers till of
recent years, because his lyrics were mainly published with music of
his own composition, he was one of the most exquisite and delightful
singers in the whole of English literature. Born in London, he went in
1581 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, left in 1585, and entered Gray's Inn
in 1586. Five of his poems appear in a Miscellany of 1591: his Latin
poems are of 1595. In 1601 appeared his first "Booke of Ayres," the
music by himself and his friend Philip Rosseter. In 1602 he put forth
"Observations on the Art of English Poesie," written, strange as it
appears, in favour of verses in quantitative metres, without rhyme.
He had taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine: he also wrote (1613)
three Masques, one was for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth, "the
Queen of Hearts," another was for the shameful nuptials of the Earl of
Somerset and Frances Howard, stained as they were with vice, vulgarity,
and murder. Campion's later "Bookes of Ayres" are of 1612 and 1617. He
died in March, 1619-1620.
Some of Campion's lyrics may have been suggested by and adapted to his
own music, in other cases he composed the music for his own words. He
employs a great number of metres, all tunable: with him music and sweet
poesy agree. To think of these songs, as Thackeray said of some of
Scott's novels, is to wish to run to the bookshelves, take them down
and read them. Nothing can be more charming than the verses on "The
Fairy Queen, Proserpina," and "Give Beauty all her right,"
Silly boy,'tis full moon yet,
Thy night as day shines clearly,
Now let her change I and spare not!
Since she proves strange, I care not!
Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day,
Breaks time, as dancers
From their own music when they stray.
Drayton.
Michael Drayton (born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, 1563, died 1631)
is a poet of nearly the same character and calibre as Daniel (of whom
later), with the same beginnings as a sonneteer, the same prolixity
in versifying history, and the same steady laborious cast of mind.
From the age of 10, as he tells us, he was bent on being a Poet, and
like greater poets, Burns, for example, he was usually inspired by
some model, which, unlike Burns, he did not transfigure and excel. His
earliest work, "The Harmony of the Church" (1591), contains rhymed
paraphrases of Biblical songs and prayers. Drayton, like Milton,
addresses the Heavenly Muse, singing "not of toys on Mount Ida, but of
triumphs on Mount Sion". Thus from Exodus XV., the triumph over Egypt,
The Lord Jehovah is a Man of War,
Pharaoh, his chariots, and his mighty host,
Were by his hand in the wild waters lost,
His captains drownèd in Red Sea so far.
In 1593 appears his "Shepherd's Garland". Spenser had made shepherds
fashionable; and eclogues were the mode. In one, "Beta," Queen
Elizabeth was praised; in another, Sir Philip Sidney was lamented.
The work, with improvements, was republished in 1606. The ballad of
Dowsabel was a pleasant and fortunate addition. Anne Goodere, later
Lady Rainsford, a daughter of Drayton's patron, Sir Henry Goodere, is
the person named Idea, in the sonnets collected under that title. If
the one famous and immortal sonnet,
Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part,
be really by Drayton, he here showed mastery; and the addresses to
Idea may not be mainly fanciful. Another sonnet on rivers, Drayton's
favourite theme in the "Polyolbion," identifies Idea's home--so far
she was certainly a real person. But there are critics who deny to him,
Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part.
It has even been attributed to Shakespeare, because of its excellence.
Following Daniel's "Complaint of Rosamond," Drayton versified the
stories of Piers Gaveston, Matilda, daughter of Lord Robert Fitzwater,
Robert Duke of Normandy, and "The Great Cromwell" (Thomas). Like
Daniel, he gave little sack to a monstrous deal of bread, in a close
following of prose chronicles. "Mortimeriados" (1596) is another
legend, in rhyme royal, of the wars of the barons against the
second and third Edwards, later recast as "The Barons' Wars," in an
eight-lined stanza. "The English Heroical Epistles" were a following
of the Letters of Ovid's heroines; there are twelve lovers and ladies,
each writes a letter and receives a reply. Rosamond, Jane Shore, and
Geraldine are, naturally, among the ladies. Drayton employs the rhymed
decasyllabic couplet, and adds learned notes, comparing, for example,
the Maze of Rosamond to the Cnossian Labyrinth of the Minotaur in
Crete. The verses are curiously modern in some places.
The poet now did work for Henslowe and the stage. Like Daniel he wrote
a panegyric of the new King, James VI and I, in 1603: it brought him
no advancement, and in the next year he made "The Owle" the mouthpiece
of a satire, opening with the outworn dream-formula which had so long
haunted verse.
In 1606 he attempted odes: the best known is on "The Virginian Voyage":
Virginia is a paradise, doubtless the laurel is indigenous, and Drayton
foresees a Virginian poet (possibly Edgar Poe, in a way a Virginian).
By the famous patriotic "Ballad of Agincourt," Drayton holds his most
secure title to popularity.
He had long been working at his "Polyolbion," in which the rivers of
England, and the great events which occurred in their valleys, are
celebrated. The first thirteen books were published in 1612-1613.
Drayton's best Muse is the patriotic. He was not encouraged by the
reception of the book (reprinted with twelve new songs in 1622), and
unhappily he stopped at the Cumberland Eden, and did not, like Richard
Franck in prose, celebrate the Scottish rivers from the Debatable Land
to the Naver. Drayton's ambling Alexandrine couplets are, at least,
interesting to the angler, for he has a minute knowledge of even such
burns as the "roaring Yarty" (mark the _Yar_, as in Cretan and Greek
Jardanus, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra-Yarra) and the troutful
Mimram, which he calls the Mimer. Had Drayton spoken more particularly
of the streams, and been less copious in endeavours "the battle in to
bring," battles Celtic, or of the many civil wars, his poem would have
more attractions. History, copious and minute, is a stumbling-block
to poetry in Drayton, and as to history, the public, he says, "take a
great pride to be ignorant thereof": "the idle humorous world must hear
of nothing that savours of antiquity".
Perhaps the idle world was more kind to the playful poem "Nimphidia"
(1627) where Titania, to the wrath of Oberon, wooes a new Bottom,
Pigwiggen. The tripping measure is that of Chaucer's "Sir Thopas": the
Fairy Queen's equipage is thus described,
Her chariot of a snail's fine shell,
Which for the colours did excell,
The fair Queen Mab becoming well,
So lively was the limning:
The seat the soft wool of the bee,
The cover, gallantly to see,
The wing of a py'd butterflee,
I trow, was ample trimming.
The venerable and undefeated singer returned to pastoral, "The Quest of
Cynthia," and (1630) gave "The Muses' Elizium," full of pretty innocent
ditties, while "Noah's Flood" is naturally in a more solemn strain, as
are "Moses, His Birth and Miracles," and "David and Goliath". These
prolix paraphrases do not greatly improve on the heroic prose of
Genesis and Samuel.
Drayton died in 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in
the Poets' Corner.
Daniel.
Samuel Daniel is one more of the poets whose names linger on in
histories of literature because they were contemporaries of Shakespeare
and Spenser and may more or less have "taken Eliza and our James". A
privately printed edition of 150 copies of Daniel's works (edited by
Dr. Grosart) keeps his laurels green in such abundance as his intrinsic
literary merits deserve. He seems to have been born near Taunton about
1562-63: his father is described as a music-master; he was at Oxford
for three years or thereabouts. He published a translation of a tract
by Paulus Jovius, "of rare inventions both military and amorous called
Imprese," in 1585. He was patronized by "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's
mother," and resided at Wilton, where she received much literary
society and he may have enjoyed excellent trout-fishing in the Nadder
and the Wily. In 1591 he "commenced poet" with twenty-seven of the
stereotyped love sonnets (not in the regular Petrarchian form) which
appeared unsigned in Nashe's edition of "Astrophel". In 1592-1594,
three editions, emended, were published; the collection is entitled
"Delia".
So sounds my Muse according as she strikes
On my heart-strings attuned unto her fame.
Probably Delia did not strike her Samuel's heart-strings with much
skill and vigour.
What though my Muse no honour got thereby,
Each bird sings to herself, and so will I.
With "Delia" appeared a long and very tedious "Complaint of Rosamond"
(who sleeps in Godstow near Oxford). The piece is in stanzas of seven
lines, and is as woeful as "The Mirror for Magistrates". The abbey
built by "the credulous devout and apt-believing ignorant" was already
ruined by the Great Pillage, and the melancholy place by the grey
waters is Rosamond's only monument. Her ghost left Daniel "to prosecute
the tenor of my woes": there is abundance of moral but very little of
music in Rosamond's "Complaint".
Daniel visited Italy about 1592, and in 1594 published "Cleopatra," a
tragedy in imitation of Seneca, with a chorus.
The chorus commences thus
Now every mouth can tell
What close was muttered:
_How that she did not well,_
_To take the course she did!_
The prologue and the chorus are the first act. Naturally in Senecan
drama Cleopatra does not commit suicide on the stage. A messenger
narrates the moving incident in two hundred and fifty rhyming verses.
In 1595 appeared the first four books of Daniel's "Civil Wars"; a
fifth book came out in 1599. In 1600 the poet became tutor to Lady Ann
Clifford, but he longed to return to his Muse, and did so in 1602. His
"Civil Wars" were now a Seven Years' War, and he achieved Book VI.
In 1603 he addressed a panegyric to James VI and I, the new King: he
obtained a Court post in connexion with the Queen's Masques, and held
his place and salary till 1618; wrote a History of England, and died at
Beckington, Somerset, in 1619. He had written Masques, and a "Defence
of Rhyme" against the friends of unrhymed verse in classical metres.
His "Civil Wars" are a chronicle in rhyme--he spares neither himself
nor the infrequent reader. Daniel opens by stating that had England
devoted herself solely to fighting abroad, she might have annexed
Europe to the Alps, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees. But this is an error:
in 1429 the tide of English conquest recoiled from the standard of the
Maid, and even before the civil wars at home England had failed to hold
the Loire.
The poem traces civil war from Richard II onwards to Edward IV, and,
as Aristotle rightly said, an Epic poem cannot be written in that way.
Daniel was an excellent man; a most industrious author, and we may say
of him in the words of his own Epistle to Lord Henry Howard,
Vertue, though luckless, yet shall 'scape contempt,
And though it hath not hap, it shall have fame.
Daniel had little of the exuberant fantasy of his time; he is
"well-languaged Daniel," and easily intelligible. But even his most
frequently quoted sonnet,
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
is far from being one of the best of poetic Hymns to Sleep, and his
best gnomic poem,
He that of such a height hath built his mind,
is far too long.
Davies.
Sir John Davies, of Tisbury in Wilts, was born about 1569, we may
suppose, if he went to Queen's, Oxford, in 1585. As a young Templar
he is said to have been a brawler, and to have been expelled from the
society for his vivacities in 1598. In 1599 Davies published his "Nosce
Teipsum" ("Know Thyself"), on the nature and properties of the Soul
and on its Immortality. The psychology may be old fashioned, but the
versification is not. Only the best poets of the age could write the
four-lined decasyllabic verses, with alternate rhymes, with the fluency
and harmony of Davies. He has an answer to all objections,
But still this crew with questions me pursues,
"If souls deceased," say they, "still living be,
Why do they not return, to bring us news
Of that strange world where they such wonders see?"
"Why do not the Esquimaux visit us and tell us about the North Pole?"
Davies replies, not quite convincingly. Henry More or Glanvill would
have answered that souls _do_ return, and made the question one of
evidence.
Davies's "The Orchestra," on dancing, is extremely graceful, melodious
and ingenious; the stanzas describing Queen Elizabeth dancing "high and
disposedly" are unfortunately lost. Even his acrostics on "Elizabetha
Regina" are charming, and wonderfully varied in ornament and
compliment--as _vers de société_ none of that age are more admirable.
Davies returned to the Temple, rose in his profession, sat in the
House of Commons, was admired by James VI for his poetry, was knighted,
and in 1606 became Attorney-General in Ireland. In 1612 he published a
valuable book on the Irish Question, which should be read with that of
Spenser.
He died after his return to England, Parliament, and the defence of the
cause of an Irish Parliament for Ireland, in 1626.
Giles and Phineas Fletcher.
Drayton and Daniel were not influenced by their great forerunner
Spenser, as were the two clerical brothers and poets, Phineas (born
1582?) and Giles Fletcher (born 1588). They were the sons of Giles
Fletcher, author of "Lida," one of the many collections of sonnets
published in 1593. He was a scholar, a man of business, and a
diplomatist. "Christ's Victory and Triumph" (1610), the chief poem of
the younger Giles is in stanzas one line shorter than the Spenserian;
it begins by observing that
the Infinite far greater grew
By growing less,
so that "'twere greatest were it none at all," as in the case of the
other poet whose wound was "so great because it was so small".
Thus does an unhappy point of wit, a "conceit," disturb the reader at
the opening of a poem on the same solemn theme as Milton's "Paradise
Regained". The poet admits us to the Councils of Eternity, and thus
sets forth the topic of his sacred song; the stanza is a fair example
of his manner:--
Ye sacred writings, in whose antique leaves
The memories of Heav'n entreasur'd lie,
Say what might be the cause that Mercy heaves
The dust of Sin above th' industrious sky,
And lets it not to dust and ashes fly?
Could Justice be of sin so overwooed,
Or so great ill be cause of so great good,
That, bloody man to save, man's Saviour shed his blood
The phrase
that Mercy _heaves_
The _dust_ of Sin above th' in_dust_rious sky,
is typical of late Elizabethan mannerism. "Heaves" is used to rhyme
to "leaves"; "the dust of sin" is apparently the redeemed soul, why
the sky is "industrious," except as a kind of pun on the preceding
"dust," is not apparent; we are to wonder why the dust of sin is not
allowed "to fly to dust and ashes,"--in short a solemn and sacred poem
can hardly be written in a style more unhappily out of keeping. When
the fate of fallen man is trembling in the balance, Mercy "smooths
the wrinkles of the Fathers brow," and Justice, observing this with
displeasure (it is like a Homeric quarrel of Athene and Aphrodite!),
throws herself between Mercy and the Father, like "a vapour from a
moory slough," and begins a virulent invective against
That wretch, beast, caitiff, Monster-Man,
who, in Egypt, is disgracing himself by animal worship, while in Greece,
Neptune spews out the lady Aphrodite.
Your songs exceed your matter--
says Giles to other poets,--
this of mine
The matter which it sings, shall make divine.
Alas! the poem, though it has fine occasional passages, some music,
and much energy, is written in a style of conceits, and of ingenious
antitheses, which are wholly out of accord with "the matter". We cannot
but see that the poet, in regard to taste, is wholly lost, is too much
a child of his time, so rich in everything but perception of form and
limit, so fantastically over-adorned in verse as in vesture.
Giles wrote of Phineas as
the Kentish lad, that lately taught
His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound.
Phineas did this in his vast allegorical poem, "The Purple Island"
(1633) (the human body). His stanzas are of seven lines, the first
four rhyming alternately, the last three have all the same rhyme.
Both poets imitate Spenser with a difference in stanza, and a notable
difference in genius; both have musical passages, and both anticipate
Milton in their choice of sacred subjects. Quarles saluted Phineas as
"The Spenser of this age". Phineas is the more musical, but also by
far the more lengthy of these Kentish swains. His "Piscatory Eclogues"
follow Spenser's pastorals. They are of a moral tendency and would not
have interested Izaak Walton. The fisher (in salt water there are no
anglers), is born "To sweat, to freeze, to watch, to fast, to toil".
Phineas attacks the indolent clergy, as Milton did.
They are
a crew of idle grooms,
Idle and bold that never saw the seas.
It is probable that Milton, as a Cambridge man, and a man with views
like those of Phineas, was well acquainted with the poems of both the
Fletchers, which are in fact the sunken stepping-stone from Spenser to
Milton.
The puritanism of Phineas's long poem, "The Locusts or Apollyonists"
(1627) preludes to the civil war. The poet will tell
Of priests, O no! Mass-priests, priests cannibal,
and
Thou purple whore, mounted on scarlet beast,
namely the Church of Rome. Satan says,
Meantime I burn, I broil, I burst with spite,
as the puritans in fact, between fear of popery and hatred of Laud and
his measures, were actually broiling and bursting. Satan, however, is
vexed by the triumphs of Protestantism in England. His fiends form
Jesuits out of matter, "foul hearts, sear'd consciences, feet swift
to blood,"--and all this when Jesuit missionaries were dying under
unspeakable tortures at the hands of the Iroquois. While Catholics were
being hanged in England, and dreaded a massacre in Scotland, Phineas
ends loyally,
Thrice happy who that Whore shall doubly pay,
This, royal Charles, this be thy happy meed,--
unhappy Charles who found in the Catholics his most loyal subjects!
It is easy but erroneous to confuse the "Piscatory Dialogues" of
Phineas with his drama, "Sicelides, a Piscatory," acted at King's
College, Cambridge (published, 1631). The dialogue is partly in rhymed
heroic couplets of much fluency and partly in prose; the play is of
a happier date (1614) than "The Apollyonists," and is written "in a
merry pin". Phineas wrote many other things, including a pretty bashful
Epithalamium.
Corbet.
Richard Corbet (1582-1635) born at Ewell in Surrey, and educated
at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, was a merry clergyman,
who laughed at but did not abuse Puritans; was liked at Court, and
successively held the Sees of Oxford and Norwich. In Aubrey's gossip
there are well-known tales about the Bishop's gaieties, and his rhymes
on a tour to Paris and on another in the North were reckoned choicely
facetious. His best poem has lost nothing in the course of time,
Farewell rewards and Fairies,
Good house-wives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.
There is also a pretty piece to his son Vincent, on attaining his
third birthday. Corbet's humorous pieces have much more vigour than
refinement: his verses were not intended for publication, and did not
appear till ten years after his death.
Sir John Beaumont.
Sir John Beaumont was the elder brother of Francis Beaumont, the
celebrated partner of Fletcher in the drama. He was born (1582) at
Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, was of Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke
College) in Oxford (1596), lived chiefly at his country place, was
created a baronet in 1626, and died in 1628. A sacred poem of his, "The
Crown of Thorns," in eight books, is lost: his "Bosworth Field" with
other pieces was brought out by his eldest son, in 1629, and dedicated
to Charles I. Ben Jonson, in prefatory verses, wrote
This book will live, it hath a genius
Above his reader,
Few readers are below the level of the poem, which Ben calls
The bound and frontier of our poesy.
"Bosworth Field" is written in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, which
come near to the measure as later used for heroic and satiric poetry,
though the lines sometimes carry on the sense in the style disused by
Pope. The story of the death of Richard III, disdaining to fly, is
spirited, though it cannot rival the old ballad on the same subject. In
translations from the "Satires of Horace," Beaumont comes nearer to the
model of Dryden and Pope. "An Ode of the Blessed Trinity" is perhaps
the most pleasing of the sacred poems. Beaumont could have taught much
to the Royal Prentice in verse, James I, whom he salutes as his master,
Your judicious rules have been my guide.
He translated the "Tenth Satire of Juvenal," and wrote many verses to
friends, and elegies.
William Browne, born about 1590-91, of a Devonshire family, went to
Exeter College, Oxford, and to the Inns of Court. In 1613 he published
the first part of his "Britannia's Pastorals," with commendatory
verses, including some, more cautious than usual, by Ben Jonson. The
pastorals have the usual defects of the obsolete kind of composition
and of Browne's own age of conceits. They are extremely prolix, very
artificial, rich in classical allusions, and occasionally in puns. The
rhymed decasyllabic couplets carry on the sense, as was usual before
Waller and Pope.
"The Shepherd's Pipe" is a collection of eclogues and dialogues between
long-winded shepherds, in a variety of metres. The popular tale of the
father's bequests, the ring, cloth, and brooch of magical qualities,
is told in stanzas of seven lines. The swains occasionally conduct
themselves very like "our liberal shepherds"; at other times their
songs of nature and the birds are pretty and pleasing. A pastoral elegy
for Mr. Thomas Elwood is an elegy and pastoral, in these respects alone
it resembles "Lycidas". In "The Inner Temple Masque," taken from the
Odyssey about Ulysses and Circe, the Sirens' song and Circe's charm are
pretty, but not on the highest level of the contemporary lyrics.
About 1624 Browne is said to have been the tutor at Oxford of the Hon.
Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Caernarvon, who fell, on the Royalist
side, at Newbury in 1643: the date of Browne's own death is unknown.
His poems seem never to have been popular. In the vast realm of Spenser
can be found all the merits of Browne on a far higher level; and
Browne's defects, for he even drops into the allegoric style which
dominated the latter Middle Ages and seemed immortal, are exceedingly
abundant in all the pastoral verse between Spenser and Milton.
George Wither (1588-1667) was one of the poets who "wrote too much
and lived too long". Only his song, "Shall I wasting in despair," can
be said to live, despite his pleasant fluency and love of country
contentments in "Philarete" (1622), "Fidelia," and "The Shepherd's
Hunting" (1615). He was among the favourites of Charles Lamb, who
discovered the neglected poet, the laughing-stock of the wits of
the Restoration. He is also highly praised by Swinburne in a most
interesting essay, "Charles Lamb and George Wither". Wither is
sometimes good, always copious.
[1] Was Donne copying a poem by Empedocles?