THE POET. (1589-1593).
[Sidenote: _Out of Favour._]
Ralegh would have been happier if he could have gone on fighting Spain
instead of returning to the discord of Court rivalries. Before the
summer was over he was again immersed in bickerings with Essex. The Earl
was prone to take offence. After the defeat of the Armada he had
challenged Ralegh to mortal combat. The unknown grievance was probably
not more serious than the title to a ribbon of the Queen's, for which, a
little later, he provoked a duel with Blount, Lord Mountjoy. Between him
and Ralegh the Council interposed. It averted a combat, and endeavoured
to suppress the fact of the challenge. The two could be bound over to
keep the peace. They could not be reconciled. Too many indiscreet or
malignant partisans were interested in inflaming the conflict. Elizabeth
tried with more or less success to adjust the balance by a rebuff to
each. She rejected Ralegh's solicitation of the rangership of the New
Forest for Lord Pembroke. She gave the post to Blount, Essex's recent
antagonist. Still, on the whole, there appears to have been some
foundation for the gossip of courtiers that Ralegh was more really in
the shade. Soon after his return from Portugal he had quitted the Court,
first, for the West, and then for Ireland. Captain Francis Allen wrote,
on August 17, 1589, to Francis Bacon's elder brother, Anthony, who
subsequently conducted Essex's foreign correspondence: 'My Lord of Essex
hath chased Mr. Ralegh from the Court, and hath confined him into
Ireland.' The statement was not accurate. Ralegh was able practically
to contradict it by his return, after a visit to Munster of a few
months. In a letter of December, 1589, he assured his cousin Carew,
'noble George,' then Master of the Ordnance in Ireland: 'For my retreat
from Court, it was upon good cause to take order for my prize. If in
Ireland they think I am not worth the respecting, they shall much
deceive themselves. I am in place to be believed not inferior to any
man, to pleasure or displeasure the greatest; and my opinion is so
received and believed as I can anger the best of them. And therefore, if
the Deputy be not as ready to stead me as I have been to defend him--be
it as it may. When Sir William Fitzwilliams shall be in England, I take
myself for his better by the honourable offices I hold, as also by that
nearness to her Majesty which I still enjoy.'
[Sidenote: _At Youghal._]
He could truly deny any permanent manifestation of a loss of royal
goodwill. He had been receiving fresh marks of it. He was about to
receive more. His Irish estate afforded sufficient ground for absence
from Court, though no less agreeable motive had concurred. He had
rounded off his huge concession by procuring from the Bishop of Lismore,
in 1587, a lease of Lismore Manor at a rent of L13 _6s. 8d._ He was
building on the site of the castle a stately habitation, which his
wealthy successors have again transformed out of all resemblance to his
work. He had conceived an affection for the Warden's house attached to
the Dominican Friary at Youghal, Myrtle Grove, or Ralegh's House, as it
came to be styled. Its present owner, Sir John Pope Hennessy, who has
made it the occasion of a picturesque but bitter monograph, thinks he
liked it because it reminded him of Hayes Barton. Other observers have
failed to see the resemblance. At present it remains much as it was when
Ralegh sat in its deep bays, or by its carved fire-place. The great
myrtles in its garden must be almost his contemporaries. He had his
experiments to watch, his potatoes and tobacco, his yellow wallflowers,
in the pleasant garden by the Blackwater. He had to replenish his farms
with well affected Englishmen whom he imported from Devon, Somerset,
and Dorset. In 1592 it is officially recorded that, beside fifty Irish
families, 120 Englishmen, many of whom had families, were settled on his
property. He was developing a mineral industry by the help of miners he
had hired from Cornwall. He was conducting, at a cost of some L200 a
year, a lively litigation with his Lismore neighbours, of which he wrote
in a few months to his cousin: 'I will shortly send over an order from
the Queen for a dismiss of their cavillations.' It was the short way of
composing law proceedings against Court favourites. He was planning the
confusion by similar means of the unfriendly Fitzwilliam's 'connivances
with usurpers of his land.' Yet a cloud there seems to have been, if
only a passing one. A memorable incident of literary history, connected
with this sojourn in Ireland, verifies the talk of the Court, and lends
it importance. It may even point to a relation between the haze dimly
discernible now, and the tempest which burst three years later.
[Sidenote: _Edmund Spenser._]
[Sidenote: _The Faerie Queene._]
Edmund Spenser had been with Lord Deputy Grey when Ralegh was a Munster
captain. But, if the poet be taken literally, they were not acquainted
before 1589. His Irish services, as Ralegh's, were rewarded out of the
Desmond forfeitures. He received 3028 acres in Cork, with Kilcolman
Castle, two miles from Doneraile. The estate formed part of a wide
plain, well watered, and, in the sixteenth century, well wooded. The
castle is now a roofless ivy-clad ruin. The poet was turning it into a
pleasant residence. Ralegh came to see it and him. Spenser has described
the visit in the tenderest and least artificial of his poems. _Colin
Clout's Come Home Again_, printed in 1595, was inscribed to his friend
in 1591. The dedication was expressed to be in part payment of an
infinite debt. The poet declared it unworthy of Sir Walter's higher
conceit for the meanness of the style, but agreeable to the truth in
circumstance and matter. Lines in the poem corroborate the hypothesis
that Elizabeth had for a time, perhaps in the summer of 1589, been
estranged from Ralegh:--
His song was all a lamentable lay
Of great unkindness, and of usage hard,
Of Cynthia, the Ladie of the Sea,
Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
They equally imply that, before Colin Clout's lay was indited, great
Cynthia had been induced by his complainings to abate her sore
displeasure--
And moved to take him to her grace againe.
The circumstances of Spenser's own introduction to Court indicate that
Ralegh had recovered favour. He read or lent to Ralegh during the visit
to Kilcolman the first three books of the _Faerie Queene_. According to
Ben Jonson he also delivered to him now or later 'the meaning of the
Allegory in papers.' The poem enchanted the visitor, who offered to
become the author's sponsor to Elizabeth. Together, if Colin Clout is to
be believed, they crossed the sea, and repaired to the Court. There--
The Shepheard of the Ocean--quoth he--
Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,
And to my oaten pipe enclin'd her eare.
The first three books of the _Faerie Queene_ were published early in
1590, with an expository letter from the most humbly affectionate author
to the Right Noble and Valorous Sir Walter Ralegh. First of all the
copies of commendatory verses prefixed to the poems stood two signed
W.R.
Spenser, in _Colin Clout_, lauded Ralegh as a poet:--
Full sweetly tempered is that Muse of his,
That can empierce a Princes mightie hart.
[Sidenote:_Cynthia._]
[Sidenote:_Date of the Poem._]
Ralegh must have shown him part of a poem addressed to Elizabeth as
Cynthia, and estimated to have contained as many as 15,000 lines when
completed, if ever. This prodigious elegy was never published by Ralegh,
and no entire manuscript of it is known to exist. Some years ago a paper
was found in the Hatfield collection, endorsed as 'in Sir Walter's own
hand.' The handwriting resembles that of Ralegh in 1603. It comprises
altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines,
come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of
seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents
consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The
twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah,
in his _Courtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose_, concludes, with some
hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between 1603 and
1612, to a much earlier poem. He sees in it allusions to the death of
the Queen, which would more or less fix the date. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in
the _Athenaeum_, in January, 1886, has contested that hypothesis. He
thinks, in the first place, that the twenty-one lines which precede, and
the twenty-one which follow, the so-called twenty-first book, have no
relation to the poem of _Cynthia_. The rest he holds to be not a
continuation of _Cynthia_, but an integral portion of the original work.
That work, as a whole, he has convinced himself, was produced during the
author's transient disgrace, between August, 1589, and its end, which
may be taken to have been not later than December in the same year. That
no part of _Cynthia_, as we have it, was written later than 1603
scarcely admits of doubt. Ralegh would not have sat down in the reign of
James to write love ditties to Elizabeth. His repinings and upbraidings
are manifestly all pointed at a dead heart, not at a dead queen. Mr.
Gosse is, however, more successful in his argument that the main
Hatfield poem was written in the lifetime of Elizabeth, than in his
attempt to date it in 1589. He assumes that the poem was a finished
composition when Ralegh read from it to Spenser. It is not likely that
it ever was finished. Spenser's allusions to it point to a conception
fully formed, rather than to a work ready for publication. In the latter
case it is improbable, to the verge of impossibility, that Ralegh should
not have communicated it to his circle. An initial objection to the view
that the twenty-first book was penned in 1589 is its reference to the--
Twelve years entire I wasted on this war,
that war being his struggle for the affection of Elizabeth. This Mr.
Gosse ingeniously, but not satisfactorily, appropriates as the main
support of his chronology. In the Paunsford recognizance Ralegh is set
down as of the Court in 1577. On no other evidence Mr. Gosse infers that
he was laying siege to Elizabeth's heart before he went to Ireland. Thus
the dozen years of the campaign would be conveniently over by the autumn
of 1589. A simpler solution seems to be to assign the rough-hewing
of the entire project of _Cynthia_, and its partial accomplishment, to
the term of Ralegh's short occultation in 1589. He might well have
disclosed to Spenser his project, and read out passages. They would be
melancholy for their sorrow's crown of sorrow, their recalling of former
undimmed felicity--
Of all which past the sorrow only stays.
They would exaggerate royal unkindness. They would hardly have descanted
on the tenderness as absolutely extinct. Even before Spenser extolled
the _Cynthia_ in _Colin Clout_ in 1591, the harshness was softened, and
had melted back to the playing at love in which Elizabeth was wont to
indulge with her courtiers. When he resumed the theme on his banishment
from Court in 1592, he would feel that he had solid cause for
lamentation. By 1594 his disgrace seemed definite; the royal kindness
won by years of devotion--
Twelve years of my most happy younger days--
appeared to have been utterly killed; and he was preparing to sail away
into space. The twenty-first book might have been written at any time
between 1592 and 1595, and its most dismal groans be fairly explicable.
Looking back to his regrets in 1589 for an episode of neglect, he could
wonder at himself--
At middle day my sun seemed under land,
When any little cloud did it obscure.
Had Spenser seen the twenty-first book of _Cynthia_ in 1591, with its
real or unreal blackness of despair, he would not have spoken of Ralegh
as basking in the renewed radiance of happy prospects. So _Cynthia_, as
far as it was ever composed, may be considered one poem, to which the
extant twenty-first book essentially belongs. There is not, therefore,
necessarily any hope, or fear, that the whole exists, or ever existed,
in a perfect shape. Ralegh would nurse the idea for all the years in
which the Queen's withdrawal of the light of her countenance gave him
comparative leisure. The twenty-first book itself would be written with
the direct purpose of softening his mistress's obduracy. The explanation
of its preservation among the Hatfield papers may be that, on the eve of
his departure, forsaken, withered, hopeless, for Guiana, it was
confided, in 1594 or 1595, to Cecil, then a good friend, for seasonable
production to the Queen. Viewed as written either in 1589, or in the
reign of James, much of the twenty-first book is without meaning. Its
tone is plain and significant for the years 1592 to 1595. If traced to
that period, it tells both of the bold coming adventure of 1595,
To kingdoms strange, to lands far-off addressed,
and of the irresistible power of 'her memory' in 1592
To call me back, to leave great honour's thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt;
To leave the purpose I so long had sought,
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.
[Sidenote: _Belphoebe._]
Concurrent testimony in favour of a date for the book later than 1589,
though much prior to 1603, is afforded by the use in it of the name
Belphoebe:
A queen she was to me--no more Belphoebe;
A lion then--no more a milk-white dove;
A prisoner in her breast I could not be;
She did untie the gentle chains of love.
Belphoebe was a word coined apparently by Spenser. To the poem of
_Cynthia_ Spenser had said he owed the idea of the name, implying that
it was of his coinage. It was fashioned, he stated, 'according to
Ralegh's excellent conceit of Cynthia, Cynthia and Phoebe being both
names of Diana.' Ralegh, by the introduction of the name into his
_Cynthia_, at once has dated the canto in which it occurs as not earlier
than 1591, or, perhaps, than 1595, and indicated his desire to link his
own verses to the eventful meeting
among the coolly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore.
[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Sonnet._]
Spenser referred again to the poem of _Cynthia_, and to Ralegh's poetic
greatness, in the most beautiful of the sonnets offered to his several
patrons at the end of his surpassing romance and allegory:
To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale,
Thy Sovereign Goddess's most dear delight,
Why do I send this rustic Madrigal,
That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite?
Thou only fit this argument to write,
In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bower,
And dainty Love learned sweetly to indite.
My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour,
To taste the streams that, like a golden shower,
Flow from the fruitful head of thy Love's praise;
Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre,
Whenso thee list thy lofty Muse to raise;
Yet, till that thou thy Poem wilt make known,
Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.
It was his return for tribute in kind. By the side of Ralegh's sonnet
its flattery hardly seems extravagant:--
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen,
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended; in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And cursed the access of that celestial thief.
[Sidenote: _Poetic Gifts._]
Before this, or Spenser's eulogy on him, was printed, Ralegh had
acquired the reputation at Court of a poet. Puttenham, a critic of high
repute, had, in _The Art of English Poesy_, printed in 1589, pronounced
'for ditty and amorous ode, Sir Walter Ralegh's vein most lofty,
insolent, and passionate.' By 'insolent,' not 'condolent,' as Anthony
Wood quotes, Puttenham meant original. His first public appearance as a
poet was in 1576, when in grave and sounding lines he maintained
Gascoigne's merits against envious detractors, as if with a presentiment
of his own fate--
For whoso reaps renown above the rest,
With heaps of hate shall surely be oppressed.
His flow of inspiration never dried up till his head rolled in the dust.
But the years between 1583 and 1593 seem, so far as dates, always in
Ralegh's career distracting, can be fixed, to have been the period of
his most copious poetic fruitfulness.
[Sidenote: _Their Limitations._]
Throughout his life he won the belief of men of letters and refinement
in his poetic power. Their admiration has never failed him in the
centuries which have followed. He has not been as fortunate in gaining
and keeping the ear of the reading public. For that a poet has not only
to be born, but to be made. Ralegh had a poet's gifts. He had music in
his soul. He chose to think for himself. He possessed the art of the
grand style. The twenty-first book of the _Cynthia_ errs in being
overcharged with thought. It abounds in noble imagery. There is pathos
as well as dignity. Its author, had he lived in the nineteenth century,
in default of new worlds to explore, or Armadas to fight, might have
written an _In Memoriam_. In previous English poetry no such dirge is to
be found as his Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney. A couple of stanzas will
indicate its solemn music:--
There didst thou vanquish shame and tedious age,
Grief, sorrow, sickness, and base fortune's might;
Thy rising day saw never woeful night,
But passed with praise from off this worldly stage.
What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?
Young years for endless years, and hope unsure
Of fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure:
O happy race, with so great praises run!
He had as light a touch. He understood how to play with a conceit till
it glances and dances and dazzles, as in his, for probably it is his,
_Grace of Wit, of Tongue, of Face_, and in _Fain would I, but I dare
not_. Praed was not happier in elaborate trifling than he in his _Cards
and Dice_. Prior might have envied him _The Silent Lover_. His _Nymph's
Reply to the Passionate Shepherd_, if it be his, as Izaak Walton without
suspicion assumes, and, if it did not compel comparison with Marlowe's
more exquisite melody, would assure his place among the poets of the
age. He was able to barb a fierce sarcasm with courtly grace. How his
fancy could swoop down and strike, and pierce as it flashed, may be felt
in each ringing stanza of _The Lie_--
Say to the Court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the Church, it shows
What's good, and doth no good:
If Church and Court reply,
Then give them both the lie.
His fancy could inspire in his _Pilgrimage_ one of the loftiest appeals
in all literature to Heaven from the pedantry of human justice or
injustice. He could match Cowley in metaphysical verse, as in _A Poesy
to prove Affection is not Love_. But the Court spoilt him for a national
poet, as it spoilt Cowley; as it might, if it had been more generous,
have spoilt Dryden. He desired to be read between the lines by a class
which loved to think its own separate thoughts, and express its own
separate feelings in its own diction, sometimes in its own jargon. He
hunted for epigrams, and too often sparkled rather than burned. He was
afraid not to be witty, to wrangle, as he himself has said,
In tickle points of niceness.
[Sidenote: _Disputed Authorship._]
Often he refined instead of soaring. In place of sympathising he was
ever striving to concentrate men's regards on himself. Egotism is not
inconsistent with the heat of inspiration, when it is unconscious, when
the poet sings because he must, and bares his own heart. Ralegh rarely
loses command of himself. He is perpetually seen registering the effects
his flights produce. Apparently he had no ambition for popular renown as
a poet. He did not print his verses. He cannot be said to have claimed
any of them but the _Farewell to the Court_. His authorship of some, now
admitted to be by him, has been confidently questioned. A critic so
judicious as Hallam, for reasons which he does not hint, and a student
as laborious as Isaac D'Israeli, have doubted his title to _The Lie_,
otherwise described as _The Soul's Errand_, which seems to demonstrate
his authorship by its scornful and cynical haughtiness embodied in a
wave of magnificent rhythm. Verses, instinct with his peculiar wit, like
_The Silent Lover_, have been given away to Lord Pembroke, Sir Robert
Ayton, and others. Its famous stanza--
Silence in love bewrays more woe
Than words, though ne'er so witty;
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
Deserveth double pity!
was in the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield.
His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read
in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national
possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them
has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse
attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent
admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he
really wrote _False Love and True Love_, with its shifting rhythm, and
its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty
_Description of Love_, or _Anatomy of Love_--
It is a yea, it is a nay;
or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or
equalled in vivacity, with the refrain--
What care I how fair she be!
Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering _Invective
against Women_, have been put down to him on no other ground than that
they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the
author of the graceful _Praise of his Sacred Diana_. He might have
sighed for a land devoid of envy,
Unless among
The birds, for prize of their sweet song.
From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue
_Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon_, which invites the genius of a
Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison
cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, _De Morte_. He might have
been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers--
You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.
But, unfortunately, the sole pretext for affirming his title, as the
editors of the 1829 collection of his works affirmed it, is that the
poems are found in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, in Davison's _Poetical
Rhapsody_, or in _England's Helicon_, and are there marked 'Ignoto.'
[Sidenote: _Carelessness of Literary Renown._]
The assignment, often, as Mr. Bullen shows in his editions of _England's
Helicon_, and _A Poetical Rhapsody_, without the slightest authority or
foundation, of poetic foundlings of rare charm and distinction to Ralegh
is a token of the prevalent belief in the unfathomed range of his
powers. At the same time it implies that he had never been adopted, and
identified, by the contemporary public specifically as a poet. He would
not be discontented with the degree and kind of the poetic fame conceded
to him. Had he coveted more he would have been at more pains to stamp
his verses. His poetic gift he valued merely as a weapon in his armoury,
like many others. It held its own and a more important place in his
career. Imagination, which might have made a poet, elevated and
illuminated the captain's and the courtier's ambition and acts. If it
put him at a disadvantage in a race for power with a Robert Cecil, it
carried him to Guiana, and gave him the palm in the glorious struggle at
the mouth of Cadiz harbour; it inspired him in the more tremendous
strife with judicial obliquity; it supported him on the scaffold in
Palace Yard.