A SEQUENCE of songs, of which this collection of Mr. Parker’s sonnets
is an example, is more recondite and remote than most of its readers
probably imagine. It would be as difficult to trace its origins as to
trace springs, which, flowing from many subterranean sources, unite
somewhere in one current, and force their way onward and upward until
they appear at last, and are hailed as the well-heads of famous rivers.
Who will may trace its beginnings to the lays of the troubadours,
which were nothing if they were not amorous: I am content to find them
on Italian soil in the sonnets of Petrarch, and on English soil in
the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey. What the literatures of Greece and
Rome were to men of letters the world over, once they were freed from
the seclusion of the manuscripts which sheltered them so long, the
literature of Italy was to English men of letters from the days of
Chaucer down. They read Italian more than they read Latin and Greek:
they wrote Italian, not more clumsily, let us hope, than they wrote
English: and they sojourned in Italy, if they could get there, not
greatly to their spiritual welfare, if the satirists of their time
are to be believed. One need not be deeply read in English literature
of the sixteenth century to perceive its obligations to Italian
literature, to detect the influences of Boccaccio, and Bandello,
and other Italian story-tellers in its drama, and the influence of
Italian poets in its poetry, particularly the influence of Petrarch,
the sweetness, the grace, the ingenuity of whose amorous effusions
captivated the facile nature of so many English singers. He was the
master of Wyatt and Surrey, who, tracking their way through the snow
of his footprints, introduced the sonnet form into English verse, and,
so far as they might, the sonnet spirit, as they understood it. They
allowed themselves, however, licenses of variation in the construction
of their octaves and sextets, which, judging from his avoidance of
them, would have displeased Petrarch,—a proceeding which was followed
by their immediate successors, who seldom observed the strict laws
of the Petrarchian sonnet. Whether the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey
were expressions of genuine emotion, or were merely poetic exercises,
is not evident in the sonnets themselves, which are formal and frigid
productions. They were handed round in manuscript copies, and greatly
admired in the courtly circles in which their authors moved, and ten
years after the death of Surrey were collected by Master Richard
Tottell, to whom belongs the honor of publishing the first miscellany
of English verse. That this miscellany, the original title of which was
“Songs and Sonnets written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard,
late Earle of Surrey and other,” was very popular is certain from the
number of editions through which it passed, and from the number of
similar publications by which it was followed. It was an epoch-making
book, like the “Reliques” of good Bishop Percy two centuries
afterwards, and like that rare miscellany was fruitful of results
in the direction of what chiefly predominated there,—the current of
personal expression in amatory sonnets. The first notable scholar
of Wyatt and Surrey, a scholar who surpassed his masters in every
poetical quality, was Sir Philip Sidney, whose sequence of sonnets
was given to the world five years after his death as “Astrophel and
Stella.” This was in 1591. Samuel Daniel appeared the next year with a
sequence entitled “Delia,” Michael Drayton a year later with a sequence
entitled “Idea,” and two years after that came Edmund Spenser with
a sequence entitled “Amoretti.” The frequency of the sonnet form in
English verse was determined at this time by this cluster of poets, to
which the names of Constable, Griffin, and others might be added, and
determined for all time by their great contemporary, whose proficiency
as a sonneteer, outside of his comedies, was chiefly confined to the
knowledge of “Mr. W. H.” and his friends until 1609. To what extent
this treasury of sonnets is read now I have no means of knowing; but
it cannot, I think, be a large one, the fashion of verse has changed
so much since they were written. They should be read for what they are
rather than what we might wish them to be; in other words, from the
Elizabethan and not the Victorian point of view. So read they seem
to me “choicely good,” as Walton said of their like, though I cannot
say that they are much better than the strong lines that are now in
fashion in this critical age. Only two of these sonnet sequences are
known to have been inspired by real persons, Sidney’s “Astrophel and
Stella,” which celebrates his enamourment of Lady Rich, and consists
of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs, and Spenser’s
“Amoretti,” which celebrates his admiration for the unknown beauty
whom he married during his residence in Ireland, and which consists of
eighty-eight sonnets, and an epithalamium. Of the two sequences, the
Sidneyan is the more poetical, and making allowance for the artificial
manner in which it is written, the more impassioned, certain of the
sonnets authenticating their right to be considered genuine by virtue
of their qualities as portraiture, their self-betrayal of the character
of Sidney, and the vividness of their picturesque descriptions or
suggestions. Such I conceive to be the twenty-seventh (“Because I oft,
in dark, abstracted guise”), the thirty-first (“With how sad steps, O
moon, thou climb’st the skies”), the forty-first (“Having this day my
horse, my hand, my lance”), the fifty-fourth (“Because I breathe not
love to every one”), the eighty-fourth (“Highway, since you my chief
Parnassus be”), and the one hundred and third (“O happy Thames, that
didst my Stella bear”). If Sidney had followed the advice of his Muse
in the first of these sonnets,
“Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write,”
that noble heart would surely have taught him to write in a simpler and
more sincere fashion than he permitted himself to do in “Astrophel and
Stella,” which is more important for what it promised than for what it
achieved.
The ease of a more practised poet than Sidney lived to be is manifest
in Spenser’s “Amoretti,”—as manifest there, I think, as in “The Faerie
Queene,” the musical cadences of whose stanzas and, to a certain
extent, its rhythmical construction are translated into sonnetry; but,
taken as a whole, they are as hard reading as most easy writing. They
are fluent and diffuse, but devoid of felicities of expression, and the
note of distinction which Sidney sometimes attains. Daniel and Drayton
were reckoned excellent poets by their contemporaries, and measured by
their standards, and within their limitations, they were; but their
excellence did not embrace the emotion which the writing of amatory
sonnets demands, nor the art of simulating it successfully, for the
“Delia” of the one was as surely an ideal mistress as the “Idea” of
the other. The substance of Drayton’s sonnets is more prosaic than
that of Daniel’s and his touch is less felicitous, is so infelicitous,
in fact, that only one of the sixty-three of which the sequence is
composed lingers in the memory as the expression of what may have been
genuine feeling. The sonnets of Daniel are distinguished for sweetness
of versification, for graces of expression, and for a vein of tender
and pensive thought which was native to him. One of them (there are
fifty-seven in all) which begins, “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the
sable night,” recalls a similar invocation to sleep in “Astrophel and
Stella,” and others, especially the nineteenth, which begins, “Restore
thy tresses to the golden ore,” remind us of some of the sonnets of
Shakespeare, whose first master in sonnetry was as certainly Samuel
Daniel, as in dramatic writing Christopher Marlowe.
Of the sonnets of Shakespeare, I shall say nothing here, for though
they form a sequence, the sequence is not of the kind which the sonnets
of Sidney and Daniel and Drayton and Spenser illustrate, and of which
the purpose is to celebrate the love of a man for a woman, but of a
kind which the genius of Shakespeare originated, and which deals with
the friendship of a man and for a man, and of which the most noteworthy
example is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” I pass, therefore, from Spenser
to Drummond of Hawthornden, who, in the year of Shakespeare’s death,
published in his second collection of verse a series of sonnets,
songs, sextains, and madrigals, the majority of which are of an
amatory nature. Modelled after the manner of his Italian and English
predecessors, and consequently academical rather than individual, they
are characterized by tenderness of sentiment and a vein of melancholy
reflection, by studied graces of scholarly phrasing which are not free
from Scotticisms, and by a chastened remembrance of his sorrow for the
loss of Mary Cunningham, the daughter of a laird, who was carried off
by a fever before the arrival of their nuptial day. The line of amatory
sonneteers ended with Drummond; but not the line of amatory poets,
the best of whom (apart from mere lyrists like Lovelace and Suckling)
was William Habington, who in 1634-1635 celebrated his affection for
Lucia, daughter of William, Lord Powis, and the worst of whom was
Abraham Cowley, who, at a later period, celebrated nobody in “The
Mistress, or Several Copies of Love-Verses.” There are exquisite things
in “Castara,” the title of which is fully justified by the spiritual
purity of the love of which it is a memorial, and there are execrable
things in “The Mistress,” where the fancy of Cowley exhausted itself in
a profusion of ingenious conceits, the brilliant absurdity of which is
absolutely bewildering. Love there is none, nor any serious pretence
of it, Cowley’s motive in writing being that poets are scarce thought
free-men of their Company, without paying some duties, and obliging
themselves to be true to Love.
To follow the succession of English amatory poets later than their
founders, the writers of sonnet sequences and their lyrical children,
lies outside the purpose of this paper, which is simply to trace the
position of Mr. Parker; so I shall say nothing of two illustrious and
comparatively recent members of the guild, one being Mr. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, who in “The House of Life” has preserved and Italianated
the romantic traditions of Sidney and Daniel, and the other, Mrs.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose “Sonnets from the Portuguese” are
the most impassioned utterances of love in any language, linking her
name forever with the burning name of Sappho. I find in “A Lover’s
Diary” a quality which is not common in the verse of to-day, and
which I find nowhere in its fulness except in the poetry of the age
of Elizabeth. To describe what evades description, I should call it
suggestion,—a vague hinting at rather than a distinct exposition of
feeling and thought,—the prescience of things which never beheld
are always expected, the remembrance of things which are only known
through the shadows they leave behind them, the perception of uncommon
capacities for pain, the anticipation of endless energies for pleasure,
the instinctive discovery and enjoyment of the secret inspirations
of love. The method which Mr. Parker preserves is that of the early
masters, whose sole business when they wrote sonnets was to write
sonnets, not caring what they proved, or whether they proved anything,
not disdaining logic, though not solicitous to obey its laws, not avid
for nor averse from the use of imagery; content, in the best words they
had, to free their minds of what was in them. They wrote well or ill,
according to their themes and moods, but nobly, gloriously, when at
their best; and to be reminded of them by a sonneteer of to-day, as I
am by Mr. Parker, is a poetic enjoyment which is not often vouchsafed
to me.