We were venturing upon almost sacred ground when--in our last chapter--we
had somewhat to say of the so-called King James’ Bible; of how it came to
bear that name; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of
certain literary qualities belonging to it, which--however excellent other
and possible future Bibles may be--will be pretty sure to keep it alive
for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists
who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London; tracked him
awhile there; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character;
spared you the recital of a world of things--conjectural or
eulogistic--which might be said of him; and finally saw him go back to his
old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman--last of all his
plays--and to die.
This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter--Shakespeare and the
English Bible! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so
interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech,
and who are eager to compass and enjoy its largest and keenest and
simplest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other
exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare
and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English
speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out
of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants,
and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a
two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make
needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary
experimentation; but these twain furnish sufficient lingual armament for
all new conquests in letters.
We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-burly of dramatists, poets,
prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way--making a descriptive
dash at some few of them--seeing the old pedant of a king growing more
slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that
unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new
singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different
strain.
_Webster, Ford, and Others._
All those lesser dramatists going immediately before Shakespeare, and
coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary
significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high
in the Elizabethan heavens; many a one among the lesser men has written
something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treasured;
but ring however loudly it may, and however musically it may, it will very
likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare.
Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long
survival may be mentioned John Webster; a Londoner in all probability;
working at plays early in the seventeenth century; his name appearing on
various title-pages up to 1624 certainly--one time as “merchant tailor;”
and there are other intimations that he may have held some church
“clerkship;” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the
eighteenth century his name and fame[23] had slipped away from people’s
knowledge; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his
mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings; a quarter of a century later
Mr. Dyce[24] wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work
for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the
old conventionalities of encyclopædic writing in declaring this dramatist
to be “hardly excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos
in all the poetic literature of the world.”
Webster was not a jocund man; he seems to have taken life in a hard way;
he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays;
but he has a dolorous way of putting all the humanities to simmer in a
great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his
chiefest works, and those by which he is best known--the “Vittoria
Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” There are blood-curdling scenes in
them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is
fascinating. The drapery is in awful keeping with the trend of the story;
the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem
to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There
are, indeed, wondrous flashes of dramatic power; by whiles, too, there are
refreshing openings-out to the light or sinlessness of common day--a
lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and
crime’s entanglements; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine,
rare panoply of green or blooming things; even the flowers are put to sad
offices, and
“do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.”
When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it
does not carry exhilarating odors with it.
John Ford[25] was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days
with that of Webster; he was indeed associated with him in some of his
work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good
family;--a little over-boastful of being above any “want for money;”
showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into
coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red
splendors of crime; his very titles carry such foretaste of foulness we do
not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for
love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder.
Animal passions run riot; the riot is often splendid, but never--to my
mind--making head in such grand dramatic utterance as crowns the gory
numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the
red riotings like blades of steel; now and then some fine touch of
pathos--of quiet contemplative brooding--lying amid the fiery wrack, like
a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods; but they are rare, and do
not compensate--at least do not compensate me--for the wadings through
bloody, foul quagmires to reach them.
Marston--another John[26]--if not up to the tragic level of the two last
named, had various talent; wrote satires, parodies; his _Image of
Pygmalion_ had the honor of being publicly burned; he wrought with Jonson
on _Eastward Hoe!_ won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century,
also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser critics. But he is
coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on
metaphysic study from _What you Will_; it reminds of the frolic moods of
Browning:
“I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept;
And still I held converse with Zabarell,
Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws
Of antique Donate:--still my spaniel slept.
Still on went I: first, _an sit anima_,
Then, an’ ’twere mortal. O hold, hold!
At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears
Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept.
Then, whether ’twere corporeal, local, fixed,
_Ex traduce_; but whether’t had free will
Or no, hot philosophers
Stood banding factions, all so strongly propped,
I staggered, knew not which was firmer part;
But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pried,
Stuffed noting books,--and still my spaniel slept.
At length he waked, and yawned, and by yon sky,
For aught I know, he knew as much as I.”
_Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher._
Some dozen or more existing plays are attributed to Philip Massinger,[27]
and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name.
Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been dependant, or _protégé_ of the
Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive
the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was
an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain
that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day;
and at the last it would appear that he found burial, only as an outsider
and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge,
where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If
Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as
we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to
his dramas; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are
murderous zealots, in his Sforza[28] story at least, who could fairly have
clashed swords with the assassins of “Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large
honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named--outside some few
of Shakespeare’s--no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New
Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose
its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times,
“He frights men out of their estates,
And breaks through all law-nets--made to curb ill men--
As they were cobwebs.”
When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave
which had been opened shortly before for John Fletcher; if not joined
there, these two had certainly been fellows in literary work; and there
are those who think that the name of Massinger should have recognition in
that great dramatic copartnery under style of Beaumont and Fletcher.[29]
Certain it is that other writers had share in the work; among them--in at
least one instance (that of “Two Noble Kinsmen”)--the fine hand of
Shakespeare.
But whatever helping touches or of outside journey-work may have been
contributed to that mass of plays which bears name of Beaumont and
Fletcher, it is certain that they hold of right that brilliant reputation
for deft and lively and winning dramatic work which put their popularity
before Jonson’s, if not before Shakespeare’s. The coupling together of
this pair of authors at their work has the air of romance; both were well
born; Fletcher, son of a bishop; Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, of
Grace-Dieu (not far away from Ashby-de-la-Zouch); both were university
men, and though differing in age by eight or nine years, yet coming--very
likely through the good offices of Ben Jonson--to that sharing of home and
work and wardrobe which the old gossip Aubrey[30] has delighted in
picturing. They wrought charmingly together, and with such a nice welding
of jointures, that literary craftsmen, of whatever astuteness, are puzzled
to say where the joinings lie. In agreement, however, with opinions of
best critics, it may be said that Beaumont (the younger, who died nine
years before his mate) was possessed of the deeper poetic fervors, while
Fletcher was wider in fertilities and larger in affluence of diction.
The dramatic horrors of Ford and Webster are softened in the lines of
these later playwrights. These are debonair; they are lively; they are
jocund; they tell stories that have a beginning and an end; they pique
attention; there are delicacies, too, and--it must be said--a good many
indelicacies; there are light-virtued women, and marital infelicities get
an easy ripening toward the over-ripeness and rottenness that is to come
in Restoration times. These twain were handsome fellows, by Aubrey’s and
all other accounts; Beaumont most noticeably so; and Fletcher--brightly
swarthy, red-haired, full-blooded--dying a bachelor and of the plague,
down in the time of Charles I., and thrust hastily into the grave at St.
Saviours, where Massinger presently followed him.
I must give at least one taste of the dramatic manner for which both of
these men were sponsors. It is from the well-known play of “Philaster”
that I quote, where Euphrasia tells of the tender discovery of what
stirred her heart:--
“My father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue: And as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so praised; but yet all this
Was but a maiden longing, to be lost
As soon as found; till, sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god
I thought (but it was you) enter our gates.
My blood flew out, and back again as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath. Then was I called away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man
Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I:
I did hear you talk
Far above singing! After you were gone,
I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched
What stirred it so. Alas, I found it Love!”
Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning
word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by
virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days
were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too,
that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of _The Faithful
Shepherdess_--bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated
classicisms--and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its
arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of
Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:--
“Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There’s nought in this life, sweet,
If man were wise to see’t,
But only melancholy,
O sweetest melancholy!
Welcome folded arms and fixèd eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,
A look that’s fastened to the ground,
A tongue chain’d up without a sound!
Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves!
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are warmly hous’d save bats and owls!
A midnight bell, a parting groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon;
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley;
Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”[31]
_King James and Family._
Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle
dotard of a King? Not well; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boastful
of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it,
and shattered the Spanish Armada, and made her will and England’s power
respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised
far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of
a father.
This son was a friend of Raleigh’s (would, maybe, have saved that great man
from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the
high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise;
but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that
Charles I. whose dismal history you know. James had also a
daughter--Elizabeth--a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fêtes
made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received
his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg.
There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in
ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambition and high
spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined
him, and that made the once owner of that princely château an outcast, and
almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and
cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his family,
as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that
monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin.
In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way--sometimes
with the Catholic powers; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle
Europe; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he
angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his
perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigration that was planting,
year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic; he harried the House of
Commons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by
and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power
of a blister that keeps irritating--and not like Elizabeth’s--the power of
a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end.
And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on
his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine
coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them
in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable;
his doublets were all dirtier; his wigs shabbier; his coarse jokes
coarser; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which
tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and
which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King
was this to preach against tobacco!
James had given up poetry-writing, in which he occasionally indulged
before coming to England; yet he had poetical tastes; he enjoyed greatly
many of Shakespeare’s plays; Ben Jonson, too, was a pet of his, and had
easy access to royalty, certainly until his quarrel with the great court
architect, Inigo Jones. But, as in all else, the King’s taste in poetry
grew coarser as he grew older, and he showed a great liking for a certain
John Taylor,[32] called “the Water-Poet,” a rough, coarse creature, who
sculled boats across the Thames for hire; who made a foot-trip into
Scotland in rivalry of Ben Jonson, and who wrote a _Very merry wherry
Voyage from London to York_, and a _Kecksy-Winsey, or a Lerry-cum-twang_,
which you will not find in your treasures of literature, but which the
leering King loved to laugh over in his cups. Taylor afterward was keeper
of a rollicking, Royalist tavern in Oxford, and of another in London,
where he died at the age of seventy-four.
Tobacco, first introduced in Raleigh’s early voyaging times, came to have
a little fund of literature crystallizing about it--what with histories of
its introduction and properties, and onslaughts upon it. Bobadil, the
braggart, in “Every Man in his Humor,” says: “I have been in the Indies
(where this herbe growes), where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more
(of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the
world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore
it cannot be, but ’tis most Divine.”
There were many curious stories afloat too--taking different shapes--of
the great apprehension ignorant ones felt on seeing people walking about,
as first happened in these times, with smoke pouring from their mouths
and noses. In an old book called _The English Hue and Crie_ (printed about
1610), it takes something like this form:
“A certain Welchman, coming newly to London, and beholding one to
take Tobacco, never seeing the like before, and not knowing the
manner of it, but perceiving him vent smoak so fast, and supposing
his inward parts to be on fire, screamed an alarm, and dashed over
him a big pot of Beer.”
King James’ _Counterblaste to the Use of Tobacco_, had about the same
efficacy with the Welshman’s beer-pot. But to show the King’s method of
arguing, I give one little whiff of it. Tobacco-lovers of that day alleged
that it cleared the head and body of ugly rheums and distillations;
“But,” says the King, “the fallacy of this argument may easily
appeare, by my late preceding description of the skyey meteors. For
even as the smoaky Vapors sucked up by the sunne and stay’d in the
lowest and colde region of the Ayre, are there contracted into
clouds, and turned into Raine, and such other watery meteors: so
this nasty smoke sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the cold
and moist braines, is by their colde and wet faculty, turned and
cast forth againe in watery distillations, and so are you made free
and purged of nothing, but _that_ wherewith you wilfully burdened
yourselves.”
Is it any wonder people kept on smoking? He reasoned in much the same way
about church matters; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have
Anglicanism thrust upon them?
The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds,
a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine
gardens; and these gardens this prematurely old and shattered man did
greatly love; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles
mourned for him very grievously; but, of a surety there was no warrant for
the half-hinted allegation of Milton’s (at a later day) that the royal son
was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, nowhere great
mourning for James.
_A New King and some Literary Survivors._
The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of
fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to
Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a
more orderly life; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate
temper and in absurd notions about his kingly prerogative. He loved
play-going and he loved poetry, though not so accessible as his father had
been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of
old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty,
though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now,
too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary
workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of
his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world[33]
knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at
the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street--not far off from
the Temple Church--where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber,
over whose door Ben has written:
“Welcome, all who lead or follow
To the oracle of Apollo!
Here he speaks out of his pottle
On the tripos--his tower-bottle,” etc.
Of all we have named hitherto among the Elizabethan poets, the only ones
who would be likely to appear there in Charles I.’s time would be George
Chapman, of the Homer translation; staid and very old now, with snowy
hair; and Dekker--what time he was out of prison for debt; possibly, too,
John Marston. Poor Ben Jonson wrote about this time his last play, which
did not take either with courtiers or the public; whereupon the old
grumbler was more rough than ever, and died a few years thereafter,
wretchedly poor, and was put into the ground--upright, tradition says, as
into a well--in Westminster Abbey. There one may walk over his name and
his crown; and this is the last we shall see of him, whose swagger has
belonged to three reigns.
Among other writers known to these times and who went somewhiles to these
suppers at the Apollo was James Howell,[34] notable because he wrote so
much; and I specially name him because he was the earliest and best type
of what we should call a hack-writer; ready for anything; a shrewd
salesman, too, of all he did write; travelling largely--having modern
instincts, I think; making small capital--whether of learning or
money--reach enormously. He was immensely popular, too, in his day; a
Welshman by birth, and never wrote at all till past forty; but afterward
he kept at it with a terrible pertinacity. He gives quaint advice about
foreign travel, with some shrewdness cropping out in it. Thus of languages
he says:
“Whereas, for other Tongues one may attaine to speak them to very
good purpose, and get their good will at any age; the French tongue,
by reason of the huge difference ’twixt their writing and speaking,
will put one often into fits of despaire and passion; but the
Learner must not be daunted a whit at that, but after a little
intermission hee must come on more strongly, and with a pertinacity
of resolution set upon her againe and againe, and woo her as one
would do a coy mistress, with a kind of importunity, until he
over-master her: She will be very plyable at last.”
Then he says, for improvement, it is well to have the acquaintance of some
ancient nun, with whom one may talk through the grated windows--for they
have all the news, and “they will entertain discourse till one be weary,
if one bestow on them now and then some small bagatells--as English
Gloves, or Knives, or Ribands--and before hee go over, hee must furnish
himself with such small curiosities.”
The expenses of travel in that day on the Continent, he says, for a young
fellow who has his “Riding and Dancing and Fencing, and Racket, and
Coach-hire, with apparel and other casual charges will be about £300 per
annum”--which sum (allowing for differences in moneyed values) may have
been a matter of $6,000. He says with great aptness, too, that the
traveller must not neglect letter-writing, which
“he should do exactly and not carelessly: For letters are the ideas
and truest mirrors of the mind; they show the inside of a man and
how he improveth himself.”
_Wotton and Walton._
Another great traveller of these times--but one whose dignities would, I
suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern--was Sir Henry
Wotton.[35] He was a man who had supplemented his university training by
long residence abroad; who had been of service to King James (before the
King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some
purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the
brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions
respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and
forwarding grafts and rare seedlings; he was familiar with most European
courts--hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and
various accomplishments, and the reputed maker of that old and well-worn
witticism about ambassadors--that “they were honest men, sent to lie
abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself
boastful of the authorship of this prickly saying, “The itch of
disputation is the scab of the church.”[36] There is also a charming
little poem of his--which gets place in the anthologies--addressed to that
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encountered as a bride at the Castle
of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and daring
Prince Rupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit,
familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or
Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a
god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his
graces, Walton[37] tells us that he was an excellent fisherman.
And this mention of the quiet Angler tempts me to enroll him here, a
little before his time; yet he was well past thirty when James died, and
must have been busy in the ordering of his draper’s shop in Fleet Street
when Charles I. came to power. He was of Staffordshire birth, and no
millinery of the city could have driven out of his mind the pretty
ruralities of his Staffordshire home, and the lovely far-off views of the
Welsh hills. His first wife was grandniece of Bishop Cranmer; he was
himself friend of Dr. Donne, to whom he listened from Sunday to Sunday; a
second wife was sister of that Thomas Ken who came to be Bishop of Bath
and Wells; so he was hemmed in by ecclesiasticisms, and loved them as he
loved trout. He was warm Royalist always, and lived by old traditions in
Church and State--not easily overset by Reformers. No fine floral triumphs
of any new gardeners, however accredited, could blind him to the old
glories of the eglantine or of a damask rose. A good and quiet friend, a
placid book, a walk under trees, made sufficient regalement for him.
These, with a fishing bout (by way of exceptional entertainment), and a
Sunday in a village church, with the Litany well intoned, were all in all
to him. His book holds spicy place among ranks of books, as lavender keeps
fresh odor among stores of linen. It is worth any man’s dalliance with the
fishing-craft to make him receptive to the simplicities and limpidities of
Walton’s _Angler_. I am tempted to say of him again, what I have said of
him before in other connection:--very few fine writers of our time could
make a better book on such a subject to-day, with all the added
information and all the practice of the newspaper columns. What Walton
wants to say, he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is
as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment
with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters
to tell of, and he tells of them--straight.
Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he
is almost the only earnest trout-fisher (unless Sir Humphry Davy be
excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I
have many excellent friends--capital fishermen--whose word is good upon
most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be religiously
confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates
without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.
I must not omit to mention his charming biographic sketches (rather than
“lives”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne--the letterpress of
all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture.
He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street
gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color; this is not
always of best authenticity, it is true;[38] but who wishes to question
when it is the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking? And
as for his great pastoral of _The Complete Angler_--to read it, in
whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through
lovely country solitudes.
I name Sir Thomas Overbury[39]--who was the first, I think, to make that
often-repeated joke respecting people who boasted of their ancestry,
saying “they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground”--because
he belonged to this period, and was a man of elegant culture and literary
promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the instance of some great people
about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a
trial that was just then to come off; and this trial and poisoning
business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned,
made one of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James.
Overbury’s _Characters_ are the best known of his writings, but they are
slight; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many
tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of
all.
_George Herbert._
This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has
never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of
Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page
of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue:
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
“Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
“Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.”
And now, that I have quoted this, I wish that I had quoted another; and so
it would be, I suppose, were I to go through the little book. One cannot
go amiss of lines that will show his tenderness, his strong religious
feeling, his gloomy coloring, his quaint conceits--with not overmuch
rhythmic grace, but a certain spiritual unction that commends him to hosts
of devout-minded people everywhere. Yet I cannot help thinking that he
would have been lost sight of earlier in the swarm of seventeenth-century
poets, had it not been for a certain romantic glow attaching to his short
life. And first, he was a scion from the old Pembroke stock, born in a
great castle on the Welsh borders, and bred in luxury. He went to
Cambridge for study at a time when he may have encountered there the grim
boy-student, Oliver Cromwell, or possibly that other fair-faced Cambridge
student, John Milton, who was upon the rolls eight years later. He was a
young fellow of rare scholarship, winning many honors; was tall, spare,
with an eagle eye; and so he wins upon old James I., when he comes down on
a visit to the University (the Mother Herbert managing to have the King
see his best points, even to his silken doublets and his jewelled buckles,
of which the lad was fond). And he is taken into favor, bandies
compliments with the monarch, goes again and again to London and to court;
sees Chancellor Bacon familiarly--corrects proofs for him--and has hopes
of high preferment. But his chief patron dies; the King dies; and that
bubble of royal inflation is at an end.
It was after long mental struggle, it would seem, that George Herbert,
whom we know as the saintly poet, let the hopes of court consequence die
out of his heart. But once wedded to the Church his religious activities
and sanctities knew no hesitations. His marriage even was an incident that
had no worldly or amorous delays. A Mr. Danvers, kinsman of Herbert’s
step-father, thought all the world of the poet, and declared his utter
willingness that Herbert “should marry any one of his nine daughters [for
he had so many], but rather Jane, because Jane was his beloved daughter.”
And to such good effect did the father talk to Jane, that she, as old
Walton significantly tells us, was in love with the poet before yet she
had seen him. Only four days after their first meeting these twain were
married; nor did this sudden union bring such disastrous result as so
swift an engineering of similar contracts is apt to show.
At Bemerton vicarage, almost under the shadow of Salisbury cathedral, he
began, shortly thereafter, that saintly and poetic life which his verse
illustrates and which every memory of him ennobles. His charities were
beautiful and constant; his love of the flesh, his early “choler,” and all
courtly leanings crucified. Even the peasants thereabout stayed the plough
and listened reverently (another Angelus!) when the sounds of his
“Praise-bells” broke upon the air. It is a delightful picture the old
Angler biographer gives of him there in his quiet vicarage of Bemerton, or
footing it away over Salisbury Plain, to lift up his orison in symphony
with the organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of
Salisbury’s wondrous cathedral.
Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his
life, a tender gloom lay constantly; the grave and death were always in
his eye--always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of
poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a
further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him
sorely, he died.
He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor.
It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a
mile and a half away; and at Wilton--the carpet town--which is only a
fifteen minutes’ walk beyond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not
long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of
Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his
poetic kinsman; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this
Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse
builded into _The Temple_ of George Herbert.
_Robert Herrick._
I deal with a clergyman again; but there are clergymen--and clergymen.
Robert Herrick[41] was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside,
not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and
it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before
the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came
pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty
manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from
his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good
jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in
Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward
Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London--learning the town,
favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, perhaps apprenticed to the
goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even
then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and
sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town
experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church
living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the
southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called
Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran
brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out
in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from
any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways
were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the
clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching
and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went
before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were
we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess
from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “noble numbers” which
take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies
and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty
couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Devon. The daffodils and
the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names.
Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow:
“The soft, sweet moss shall be thy bed,
With crawling woodbine overspread:
By which the silver-shedding streams
Shall gently melt thee into dreams.
Thy clothing next, shall be a gown
Made of the fleeces’ purest down.
The tongues of kids shall be thy meat;
Their milk thy drink; and thou shalt eat
The paste of filberts for thy bread,
With cream of cowslips butterèd:
Thy feasting table shall be hills
With daisies spread and daffodils;
Where thou shalt sit, and Red-breast by,
For meat, shall give thee melody.”
Then again, see how in his soberer and meditative moods, he can turn the
rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet
sound:
“In the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When I lie within my bed,
Sick in heart, and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the house doth sigh and weep,
And the world is drown’d in sleep,
Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the passing bell doth toll,
And the furies in a shoal
Come, to fright a parting soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the judgment is reveal’d,
And that opened which was seal’d,
When to thee I have appeal’d,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!”
Now, in reading these two poems of such opposite tone, and yet of agreeing
verbal harmonies, one would say--here is a singer, serene, devout, of
delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One
would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal
for earth.
Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far as I can find it, no
matter what cherished images may break down. This Robert Herrick was a
ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a
great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red
lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a
massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.[42] It was such a
figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest
pleasures.
The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he
taught to drink beer out of his own tankard; and an old parishioner, for
whose story Anthony à Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when
his little Devon congregation would not listen to him as he thought they
ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the floor, and marched with
tremendous stride out of church--home to fondle his pet pig.
When Charles I. came to grief, and when the Puritans began to sift the
churches, this Royalist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the
meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced
return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles’ execution
at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publication was made of the
_Hesperides, or Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick,
Esq._--his clerical title dropped.
There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to
the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal
felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh
spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made
him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned
words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those
gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things
which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the
Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses
it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge,
Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later
years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his
Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace,
and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech.
At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old
parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils,
at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer,
we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse:
“For these my unbaptizèd rhymes
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,
For every sentence, clause, and word
That’s not inlaid with thee, O Lord;
Forgive me, God, and blot each line
Out of my book, that is not thine!”
_Revolutionary Times._
I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are
many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have
held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories
except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their
glories.
The writers of this particular period--some of whom I have named--fairly
typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors
and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy,
more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.[43] The cunning of
word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit;
humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place
of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws
of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words
and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love
and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration.
Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers
held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, minstrelsy,
wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering
support of great tranquillity and great national pride. In the days when
the Armada was crushed, when British ships and British navigators brought
every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of
the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to England’s great Virgin
Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in
the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity; the
fever of Puritans against Anglicans, of Independents against Monarchy Men,
is raging through all the land; pride in the kingship of such as James I.
had broken down; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles I. has
broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the
new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny
gleams of poesy break in.
There are colonies, too, planted over seas, and growing apace in these
days, whither the eyes and thoughts of many of the bravest and clearest
thinkers are turning. Even George Herbert, warmest of Anglicans, and of
the noble house of Pembroke, was used to say, “Religion[44] is going over
seas.” They were earnest, hard workers, to be sure, who
went--keen-thoughted--far-seeing--most diligent--not up to poems indeed,
save some little occasional burst of melodious thanksgiving. But they
carried memories of the best and of the strongest that belonged to the
intellectual life of England. The ponderous periods of Richard Hooker, and
the harshly worded wise things of John Selden,[45] found lodgement in
souls that were battling with the snows and pine-woods where Andover and
Salem and Newburyport were being planted. And over there, maybe, first of
all, would hope kindle and faith brighten at sound of that fair young
Puritan poet, who has just now, in Cambridge, sung his “Hymn of the
Nativity.”[46]
But the storm and the wreck were coming. There were forewarnings of it in
the air; forewarnings of it in the court and in Parliament; forewarnings
of it in every household. City was to be pitted against city; brother
against brother; and in that “sea of trouble,” down went the King and the
leaders of old, and up rose the Commonwealth and the leaders of the new
faith.
In our next talk we shall find all England rocking on that red wave of
war. You would think poets should be silent, and the eloquent dumb; but we
shall hear, lifting above the uproar, the golden language of Jeremy
Taylor--the measured cadences of Waller--the mellifluous jingle of
Suckling and of his Royalist brothers, and drowning all these with its
grand sweep of sound, the majestic organ-music of Milton.