COURT AND AGE OF ELIZABETH.
DRAYTON, DANIEL, DRUMMOND, &c.
The voluminous Drayton[109] has left a collection of sonnets under the
fantastic title of his IDEAS. Ideas they may be,--but they have neither
poetry, nor passion, nor even elegance:--a circumstance not very
surprising, if it be true that he composed them merely to show his
ingenuity in a style which was then the prevailing fashion of his time.
Drayton was never married, and little is known of his private life. He
loved a lady of Coventry, to whom he promises an immortality he has not
been able to confer.
How many paltry, foolish, painted things
That now in coaches trouble every street,
Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,
E'er they be well wrapp'd in their winding-sheet;
While I to thee eternity shall give,
When nothing else remaineth of these days,
_And Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise;_
Virgins and matrons reading these my rhimes,
Shall be so much delighted with thy story,
That they shall grieve they liv'd not in these times,
To have seen thee, their sex's only glory:
So thou shall fly above the vulgar throng,
Still to survive in my immortal song.
There are fine nervous lines in this Sonnet: we long to hail the exalted
beauty who is announced by such a flourish of trumpets, and are
proportionably disappointed to find that she has neither "a local
habitation nor a name." Drayton's little song,
I prythee, love! love me no more,
Take back the heart you gave me!
stands unique, in point of style, among the rest of his works, and is
very genuine and passionate. Daniel,[110] who was munificently
patronized by the Lord Mountjoy, mentioned in the preceding sketch, was
one of the most graceful sonnetteers of that time; and he has touches of
tenderness as well as fancy; for _he_ was in earnest, and the object of
his attachment was real, though disguised under the name of Delia. She
resided on the banks of the river Avon, and was unmoved by the poet's
strains. Rank with her outweighed love and genius. Daniel says of his
Sonnets--
Though the error of my youth in them appear,
Suffice they show I lived, and loved thee dear.
The lines
Restore thy tresses to the golden ore,
Yield Citherea's son those arcs of love,
are luxuriantly elegant, and quite Italian in the flow and imagery. Her
modesty is prettily set forth in another Sonnet--
A modest maid, deck'd with a blush of honour,
Whose feet do tread green paths of youth and love,
The wonder of all eyes that look upon her,
Sacred on earth, designed a Saint above!
After a long series of sonnets, elaborately plaintive, he interrupts
himself with a little touch of truth and nature, which is quite
refreshing;
I must not grieve my love! whose eyes should read
Lines of delight, whereon her youth might smile;
The flowers have time before they come to seed,
And she is young, and now must sport the while.
And sport, sweet maid! in season of these years,
And learn to gather flow'rs before they wither;
And where the sweetest blossom first appears,
Let Love and Youth conduct thy pleasures thither.
If the lady could have been won by poetical flattery, she must have
yielded. At length, unable to bear her obduracy, and condemned to see
another preferred before him, Daniel resolved to travel; and he wrote,
on this occasion, the most feeling of all his Sonnets.
And whither, poor forsaken! wilt thou go?
Daniel remained abroad several years, and returning, cured of his
attachment, he married Giustina Florio, of a family of Waldenses, who
had fled from the frightful persecutions carried on in the Italian Alps
against that miserable people. With her, he appears to have been
sufficiently happy to forget the pain of his former repulse, and enjoy,
without one regretful pang, the fame it had given him as a poet.
Drummond, of Hawthornden,[111] is yet more celebrated, and with reason.
He has elegance, and sweetness, and tenderness; but not the pathos or
the passion we might have expected from the circumstances of his
attachment, which was as real and deep, as it was mournful in its issue.
He loved a beautiful girl of the noble family of Cunningham, who is the
Lesbia of his poetry. After a fervent courtship, he succeeded in
securing her affections; but she died, "in the fresh April of her
years," and when their marriage-day had been fixed. Drummond has left us
a most charming picture of his mistress; of her modesty, her retiring
sweetness, her accomplishments, and her tenderness for him.
O sacred blush, empurpling cheeks, pure skies
With crimson wings, which spread thee like the morn;
O bashful look, sent from those shining eyes;
O tongue in which most luscious nectar lies,
That can at once both bless and make forlorn;
Dear coral lip, which beauty beautifies,
That trembling stood before her words were born;
And you her words--words! no, but golden chains,
Which did enslave my ears, ensnare my soul;
Wise image of her mind,--mind that contains
A power, all power of senses to controul;
So sweetly you from love dissuade do me,
That I love more, if more my love can be.
The quaint iteration of the same word through this Sonnet has not an ill
effect. The lady was in a more relenting mood when he wrote the Sonnet
on her lips, "those fruits of Paradise,"--
I die, dear life! unless to me be given
As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers,
Or there be silver drops in Iris' showers,
Or stars there be in all-embracing heaven;
And if displeased ye of the match remain,
Ye shall have leave to take them back again!
He mentions a handkerchief, which, in the days of their first
tenderness, she had embroidered for him, unknowing that it was destined
to be steeped in tears for her loss!--In fact, the grief of Drummond on
this deprivation was so overwhelming, that he sunk at first into a total
despondency and inactivity, from which he was with difficulty roused. He
left the scene of his happiness, and his regrets--
Are these the flowery banks? is this the mead
Where she was wont to pass the pleasant hours?
Is this the goodly elm did us o'erspread,
Whose tender rind, cut forth in curious flowers
By that white hand, contains those flames of ours?
Is this the murmuring spring, us music made?
Deflourish'd mead, where is your heavenly hue?
He travelled for eight years, seeking, in change of place and scene,
some solace for his wounded peace. There was a kind of constancy even in
Drummond's inconstancy; for meeting many years afterwards with an
amiable girl, who bore the most striking resemblance to his lost
mistress, he loved her for that very resemblance, and married her. Her
name was Margaret Logan. I am not aware that there are any verses
addressed to her.
Drummond has been called the Scottish Petrarch: he tells us himself,
that "he was the first in this Isle who did celebrate a dead
mistress,"--and his resemblance to Petrarch, in elegance and sentiment,
has often been observed: he resembles him, it is true--but it is as a
professed and palpable imitator resembles the object of his imitation.
* * * * *
On glancing back at the age of Elizabeth,--so adorned by masculine
talent, in arts, in letters, and in arms,--we are at first surprised to
find so few distinguished women. It seems remarkable that a golden epoch
in our literature, to which she gave her name "the Elizabethan age,"--a
court in which a female ruled,--a period fruitful in great poets, should
have produced only one or two women who are interesting from their
poetical celebrity. Of these, Alice Spenser, Countess of Derby, and Mary
Sydney, Countess of Pembroke, (the sister of Sir Philip Sydney) are the
most remarkable; the first has enjoyed the double distinction of being
celebrated by Spenser in her youth, and by Milton in her age,--almost
too much honour for one woman, though she had been a muse, and a grace,
and a cardinal virtue, moulded in one. Lady Pembroke has been celebrated
by Spenser and by Ben Jonson, and was, in every respect, a most
accomplished woman. To these might be added other names, which might
have shone aloft like stars, and "shed some influence on this lower
world:" if the age had not produced two women, so elevated in station,
and so every way illustrious by accidental or personal qualities, that
each, in her respective sphere, extinguished all the lesser orbs around
her. It would have been difficult for any female to seize on the
attention, or claim either an historical or poetical interest, in the
age of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart.
In her own court, Elizabeth was not satisfied to preside. She could as
ill endure a competitor in celebrity or charms, as in power. She
arrogated to herself all the incense around her; and, in point of
adulation, she was like the daughter of the horse-leech, whose cry was,
"give! give!" Her insatiate vanity would have been ludicrous, if it had
not produced such atrocious consequences. This was the predominant
weakness of her character, which neutralized her talents, and was
pampered, till in its excess it became a madness and a vice. This
precipitated the fate of her lovely rival, Mary Queen of Scots. This
elevated the profligate Leicester to the pinnacle of favour, and kept
him there, sullied as he was by every baseness and every crime;[112]
this hurried Essex to the block; banished Southampton; and sent Raleigh
and Elizabeth Throckmorton to the Tower. Did one of her attendants, more
beautiful than the rest, attract the notice or homage of any of the gay
cavaliers around her,--was an attachment whispered, a marriage
projected,--it was enough to throw the whole court into consternation.
"Her Majesty, the Queen, was in a passion;" and, then, heaven help the
offenders! It was the spirit of Harry the Eighth let loose again. Yet
such is the reflected glory she derives from the Sydneys and the
Raleighs, the Walsinghams and Cecils, the Shakspeares and Spensers of
her time, that we can scarce look beyond it, to stigmatise the hard
unfeminine egotism of her character.
There was something extremely poetical in her situation, as a maiden
queen, raised from a prison to a throne, exposed to unceasing danger
from without and treason from within, and supported through all by her
own extraordinary talents, and by the devotion of the chivalrous,
gallant courtiers and captains, who paid to her, as their queen and
mistress, a homage and obedience they would scarce have paid to a
sovereign of their own sex. All this display of talent and heroism, and
chivalrous gallantry, has a fine gorgeous effect to the
imagination;--but for the woman herself,--as a woman, with her pedantry,
and her absurd affectation; her masculine temper and coarse insolence;
her sharp, shrewish, cat-like face, and her pretension to beauty, it is
impossible to conceive any thing more anti-poetical.
Yet had she praises in all plenteousness
Pour'd upon her, like showers of Castalie.[113]
She was a favourite theme of the poets of the time, and by right divine
of her sceptre and her sex, an object of glorious flattery, not always
feigned, even where it was false.
She is the Gloriana of Spenser's Fairy Queen,--she is the "Cynthia, the
ladye of the sea,"--she is the "Fair Vestal throned in the West," of
Shakspeare--
That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,)
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair Vestal, throned by the West,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon;
And the imperial vot'ress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free.
And the previous allusion to Mary of Scotland, as the "Sea Maid on the
Dolphin's back,"
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
is not less exquisite.
It would, in truth, have been easier for Mary to have calmed the rude
sea than her ruder and wilder subjects. These two queens, so strangely
misplaced, seem as if, by some sport of destiny, each had dropt into the
sphere designed for the other. Mary should have reigned over the
Sydneys, the Essexes, the Mountjoys;--and with her smiles, and sweet
words; and generous gifts, have inspired and rewarded the poets around
her. Elizabeth should have been transferred to Scotland, where she might
have bandied frowns and hard names with John Knox, cut off the heads of
rebellious barons, and boxed the ears of ill-bred courtiers.
This is no place to settle disputed points of history, nor, if it were,
should I presume to throw an opinion in to one scale or the other; but
take the two queens as women merely, and with a reference to apparent
circumstances, I would rather have been Mary than Elizabeth; I would
rather have been Mary, with all her faults, frailties, and
misfortunes,--all her power of engaging hearts,--betrayed by her own
soft nature, and the vile or fierce passions of the men around her, to
die on a scaffold, with the meekness of a saint and the courage of a
heroine, with those at her side who would willingly have bled for
her,--than I would have been that heartless flirt, Elizabeth, surrounded
by the oriental servility, the lip and knee homage of her splendid
court; to die at last on her palace-floor, like a crushed wasp--sick of
her own very selfishness--torpid, sullen, and despairing,--without one
friend near her, without one heart in the wide world attached to her by
affection or gratitude.
There is more true and earnest feeling in some little verses written by
Ronsard on the unhappy Queen of Scots, than in all the elegant,
fanciful, but extravagant flattery of Elizabeth's poets. After just
mentioning the English Queen, whom he dispatches in a single line,--
Je vis leur belle reine, honnete et vertueuse;
he thus dwells on the charms of Mary:--
Je vis des Ecossais la Reine sage et belle,
Qui de corps et d'esprits ressemble une immortelle;
J'approchai de ses yeux, mais bien de deux soleils,
Deux soleils de beaute, qui n'ont point leurs pareils.
Je les vis larmoyer d'une claire rosee,
Je vis d'un clair crystal sa paupiere arrosee,
Se souvenant de France, et du sceptre laisse,
Et de son premier feu, comme un songe passe!
And when Mary was a prisoner, he dedicated to her a whole book of poems,
in which he celebrates her with a warmth, the more delightful that it
was disinterested. He thanks her for selecting his poems, to amuse her
solitary hours, and adds feelingly,--
Car, je ne veux en ce monde choisir
Plus grand honneur que vous donner plaisir!
Mary did not leave her courteous poet unrewarded. She contrived, though
a prisoner, to send him a casket containing two thousand crowns, and a
vase, on which was represented Mount Parnassus, and a flying Pegasus,
with this inscription:--
A Ronsard, l'Apollon de la source des Muses.
No one understood better than Mary the value of a compliment from a
beauty, and a queen; had she bestowed more precious favours with equal
effect and discrimination, her memory had escaped some disparagement.
Ronsard, we are told, was sufficiently a poet, to value the inscription
on his vase more than the gold in the casket.
Apropos to Ronsard: the history of his loves is so whimsical and so
truly French, that it must claim a place here.
Yet now I am upon French ground, I may as well take the giant's advice,
and "begin at the beginning."[114] It seems at first view unaccountable
that France, which has produced so many remarkable women, should scarce
exhibit one poetical heroine of great or popular interest, since its
language and literature assumed their present form; not one who has been
rendered illustrious or dear to us by the praises of a poet lover. The
celebrity of celebrated French women is, in truth, very anti-poetical.
The memory of the kiss which Marguerite d'Ecosse[115] gave to Alain
Chartier, has long survived the verses he wrote in her praise. Clement
Marot, the court poet of Francis the First, was the lover, or rather one
of the lovers, of Diana of Poictiers (mistress to the Dauphin,
afterwards Henry the Second). She was confessedly the most beautiful and
the most abandoned woman of her time. Marot could hardly have expected
to find her a paragon of constancy; yet he laments her fickleness, as if
it had touched his heart.
A DIANE.
Puisque de vous je n'ai autre visage,
Je m'en vais rendre hermite en un desert,
Pour prier Dieu, si un autre vous sert,
Qu'autant que moi en votre honneur soit sage.
Adieu, Amour! adieu, gentil corsage!
Adieu ce teint! adieu ces friands yeux!
Je n'ai pas eu de vous grand avantage,--
Un moins aimant aura peut-etre mieux.
In a _liaison_ of mere vanity and profligacy, the transition from love
(if love it be) to hatred and malignity, is not uncommon--as Spenser
says so beautifully,
Such love might never long endure,
However gay and goodly be the style,
That doth ill cause or evil end enure:
For Virtue is the band that bindeth hearts most sure!
From being the lady's _lover_, Marot became her satirist; instead of
_chansons_ in praise of her beauty, he circulated the most biting and
insufferable epigrams on her person and character. We are told by one,
who, I presume, speaks _avec connaissance de fait_, that a woman's
revenge
Is like the tiger's spring,
Deadly and quick, and crushing.
Diana was a libelled beauty, all powerful and unprincipled. Marot, in
some moment of gaiety and overflowing confidence, had confessed to her
that he had eaten meat on a "jour maigre:" he had better in those days
have committed all the seven deadly sins; and when the lady revealed his
unlucky confession, and denounced him as a heretic, he was immediately
imprisoned. Instead, however, of being depressed by his situation, or
moved to make any concessions, he published from his prison a most
ludicrous lampoon on his _ci-devant_ mistress, of which the burthen was,
"Prenez le, il a mange le lard!" He afterwards made his escape, and took
refuge in the court of Renee, Duchess of Ferrara; and though
subsequently recalled to France, he continued to pursue Diana with the
most bitter satire, became a second time a fugitive, partly on her
account, and died in exile and poverty.[116]
Marot has been called the French Chaucer. He resembles the English poet
in liveliness of fancy, picturesque imagery, simplicity of expression,
and satirical humour; but he has these merits in a far less degree; and
in variety of genius, pathos and power, is immeasurably his inferior.
Ronsard, to whom I at length return, was the successor of Marot. In his
time the Italian sonnetteers, as Petrarch, Bembo, Sanazzaro, were the
prevailing models, and classical pedantry the prevailing taste. Ronsard,
having filled his mind with Greek and learning, determined to be a
poet, and looked about for a mistress to be the object of his songs:
for a poet without a mistress was then an unheard-of anomaly. He fixed
upon a beautiful woman of Blois, named Cassandre, whose Greek
appellative, it is said, was her principal attraction in his fancy. To
her he addressed about two hundred and twenty sonnets, in a style so
lofty and pedantic, stuffed with such hard names and philosophical
allusions, that the fair Cassandra must have been as wise as her
namesake, the daughter of Priam, to have comprehended her own praises.
Ronsard's next love was more interesting. Her name was Marie: she was
beautiful and kind: the poet really loved her; and consequently, we find
him occasionally descending from his heights of affectation and
scholarship, to the language of truth, nature and tenderness. Marie died
young; and among Ronsard's most admired poems are two or three little
pieces written after her death. As his works are not commonly met with,
I give one as a specimen of his style:--
EPITAPHE DE MARIE.
Ci reposent les os de la belle Marie,
Qui me fit pour un jour quitter mon Vendomois,[117]
Qui m'echauffa le sang au plus verd de mes mois;
Qui fut toute mon tout, mon bien, et mon envie.
En sa tombe repose honneur et courtoisie,
Et la jeune beaute qu'en l'ame je sentois,
Et le flambeau d'Amour, ses traits et son carquois,
Et ensemble mon coeur, mes pensees et ma vie.
Tu es, belle Angevine,[117] un bel astre des cieux;
Les anges, tous ravis, se paissent de tes yeux,
La terre te regrette, O beaute sans seconde!
Maintenant tu es vive, et je suis mort d'ennui,
Malheureux qui se fie en l'attente d'autrui;
Trois amis m'ont trompe,--toi, l'amour, et le monde.
Ronsard had by this time acquired a reputation which eclipsed that of
all his contemporaries. He was caressed and patronised by Charles the
Ninth (of hateful memory), who, like Nero, exhibited the revolting
combination of a taste for poetry and the fine arts, with the most
sanguinary and depraved dispositions. Ronsard, having lost his Marie,
was commanded by Catherine de' Medicis to select a mistress from among
the ladies of her court, to be the future object of his tuneful homage.
He politely left her Majesty to choose for him, prepared to fall in love
duly at the royal behest; and Catherine pointed out Helene de Surgeres,
one of her maids of honour, as worthy to be the second Laura of a second
Petrarch. The docile poet, with zealous obedience, warbled the praises
of Helene for the rest of his life. He also consecrated to her a
fountain near his chateau in the Vendomois, which has popularly
preserved her name and fame. It is still known as the "Fontaine
d'Helene."
Helene was more witty than beautiful, and, though vain of the celebrity
she had acquired in the verses of Ronsard, she either disliked him in
the character of a lover, or was one of those lofty ladies
Who hate to have their dignity profaned
With any relish of an earthly thought.[118]
She desired the Cardinal du Perron would request Ronsard (in her name)
to prefix an epistle to the odes and sonnets addressed to her, assuring
the world that this poetical love had been purely Platonic. "Madam,"
said the Cardinal, "you had better give him leave to prefix your
picture."[119]
I presume my fair and gentle readers (I shall have none, I am sure, who
are not one or the other, or both,) are as tired as myself of all this
affectation, and glad to turn from it to the interest of passion and
reality.
"There is not," says Cowley, "so great a lie to be found in any poet, as
the vulgar conceit of men, that lying is essential to good poetry." On
the contrary, where there is not truth, there is nothing--
Rien n' est beau que le vrai,--le vrai seul est aimable!
While the Italian school of amatory verse was flourishing in France,
Spain, and England, almost to the extinction of originality in this
style, the brightest light of Italian poesy had arisen, and was shining
with a troubled splendour over that land of song. How swiftly at the
thought does imagination shoot, "like a glancing star," over the wide
expanse of sea and land, and through a long interval of sad and varied
years! I am again standing within the porch of the church of San
Onofrio, looking down upon the little slab in its dark corner, which
covers the bones of TASSO.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Died 1631
[110] Died in 1619.
[111] Died 1649.
[112] Leicester's influence over Elizabeth appeared so unaccountable,
that it was ascribed to magic, and to her evil stars.
[113] Spenser's Daphnaida.
[114]
Belier, mon ami! Commencez par le commencement!
COUNT HAMILTON.
[115] "La gentille Marguerite," the unhappy wife of Louis the Eleventh.
Beautiful, accomplished, and in the very spring of life, she died a
victim to the detestable character of her husband. When one of her
attendants spoke of hope and life, the Queen, turning from her with an
expression of deep disgust, exclaimed with a last effort, "Fi de la vie!
ne m'en parlez plus!"--and expired.
[116] At Althorp, the seat of Lord Spenser, there is a most curious
picture of Diana of Poictiers, once in the Crawford collection: it is a
small half-length; the features are fair and regular; the hair is
elaborately dressed with a profusion of jewels; but there is no drapery
whatever, except a curtain behind: round the head is the legend from the
forty-second Psalm,--"Comme le cerf braie apres le decours des eaues,
ainsi brait mon ame apres toi, O Dieu!" which is certainly a most
extraordinary and profane application. In the days of Diana of
Poictiers, Marot had composed a version of the Psalms, then very
popular. It was the fashion to sing them to dance and song tunes; and
the courtiers and beauties had each their favourite psalm, which served
as a kind of _devise_. This may explain the very singular inscription on
this very singular picture.
[117] Ronsard was a native of the Vendomois, and Marie, of Anjou.
[118] Ben Jonson.
[119] V. Bayle Dictionnaire Historique.--Pierre de Ronsard was born in
1524, and died in 1585.