Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes love
as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his most
beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of love-making
rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitely
better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is known
about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous
experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitch
balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant
presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other
too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are
said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried
most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His
English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even
to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in
which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a
pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally
inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures
in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort":
My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive.
But, soon as once is set our little light,
Then must we sleep our ever-during night.
Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let their
lovers moan." If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the Fairy
Queen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their white
hands and pitiless arms. Campion is the Fairy Queen's court poet. He
claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as her
subjects:
In myrtle arbours on the downs
The Fairy Queen Proserpina,
This night by moonshine leading merry rounds,
Holds a watch with sweet love,
Down the dale, up the hill;
No plaints or groans may move
Their holy vigil.
All you that will hold watch with love,
The Fairy Queen Proserpina
Will make you fairer than Dione's dove;
Roses red, lilies white
And the clear damask hue,
Shall on your cheeks alight:
Love will adorn you.
All you that love, or lov'd before,
The Fairy Queen Proserpina
Bids you increase that loving humour more:
They that have not fed
On delight amorous,
She vows that they shall lead
Apes in Avernus.
It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of
the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does.
There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that can
compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music.
Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation,
was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart were
also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earth
for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least it
transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love nor
the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary;
but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in
music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. His
poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are
the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the
burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath
these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful
feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were
golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,
admiration treads on the heels of worship.
All that I sung still to her praise did tend;
Still she was first, still she my song did end--
in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's
work. Compared with this, that other song beginning:
Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Though thou be black as night,
And she made all of light,
Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow--
seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songs
hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The compliment is
certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out--
When thou must home to shades of underground,
And, there arriv'd, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,
White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finisht love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;
but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in the
second verse:
Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.
There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an act of
courtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expense
of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles Campion to a
place above any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare as a writer of
songs. His dates (1567-1620) almost coincide with those of Shakespeare.
Living in an age of music, he wrote music that Shakespeare alone could
equal and even Shakespeare could hardly surpass. Campion's words are
themselves airs. They give us at once singer and song and stringed
instrument.
It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way comparable to
Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merely
because of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he pours
out in his songs. In contrast with his abundance, Campion's fortune seems
lean, like his person. Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies.
Shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant
background of the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of the
existence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among his
songs there is nothing comparable to "When daisies pied and violets blue,"
or "Where the bee sucks," or "You spotted snakes with double tongue," or
"When daffodils begin to peer," or "Full fathom five," or "Fear no more
the heat o' the sun." He had neither Shakespeare's eye nor Shakespeare's
experiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse. He
knows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write
There is a garden in her face,
Where roses and white lilies grow,
he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers.
Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his
genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs he
dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." It is as though
he thought, like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should be
written in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into
Latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue as
English. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own language in
comparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main quarrel with it
arose, however, from the obstinacy with which English poets clung to "the
childish titillation of rhyming." "Bring before me now," he wrote, "any
the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be able
to read his lame, halting rhymes." There are few more startling paradoxes
in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did
more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the
English language. The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in
his astonishing _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, in which he
sets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy." The bent of his
genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to
provide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in the
circumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time,
ear-pleasing rhymes without art." His songs can hardly be called
"pot-boilers," but they were equally the children of chance. They were
accidents, not fulfilments of desire. Luckily, Campion, writing them with
music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "In these
English airs," he wrote in one of his prefaces, "I have chiefly aimed to
couple my words and notes lovingly together." It would be impossible to
improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. Only one of
his good poems, "Rosecheek'd Laura," is to be found among those which he
wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the rest are among
those in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as a
duty, but as a diversion.
Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion's
music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campion
of Dublin, Ireland." The art--and in Campion it was art, not
artlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil,"
"sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and
assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and
"plainness," for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of
Irish than of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whether
Campion's grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures. Of
Campion himself we know that his training was English. He went to
Peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was
apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge of
his day. "I know, Cambridge," apostrophized a writer of the time,
"howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste, yet suffer
them to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be
gentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had left
Cambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet master
Campion."
The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. He was
admitted to Gray's Inn, but was never called to the Bar. That he served as
a soldier in France under Essex is inferred by his biographers. He
afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine during
his travels abroad or in England is not known. The most startling fact
recorded of his maturity is that he acted as a go-between in bribing the
Lieutenant of the Tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliable
successor on the eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This he did on
behalf of Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. Percival
Vivian says, "actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies." Campion
afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers.
Both Monson and he, however, are universally believed to have been
innocent agents in the crime. Campion boldly dedicated his _Third Book of
Airs_ to Monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed.
As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of having
been a man of general virtue. It is not only that he added piety to
amorousness. This might be regarded as flirting with religion. Did not he
himself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light songs; "He that
in publishing any work hath a desire to content all palates must cater for
them accordingly"? Even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs has
been exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a charming
and tender spirit.
Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,
Never tired pilgrim's limbs affected slumber more,
Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast.
O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest.
What has the "sweet master Campion" who wrote these lines to do with
poisoned tarts and jellies? They are not ecstatic enough to have been
written by a murderer.