^*M^ William Collins 273-280 - Mark Akenside , . 281-287 Oliver Goldsmith 288-295 Charles Churchill 296-300 William Cowper 301-310 James Beattie , . 311-317 /Thomas Chatterton 318-332 George Crabbe . 333-344 William Blake 345-356 Samuel Rogers , . 357-365 Thomas Campbell 366-376 ' Robert Burns 377-390 Births and Deaths . 391-392 Index of First Words 393-411 THE POETS CHAUCER—TENNYSON A.D. 1340-1892 I MAY be asked how I can have dared to sit in judgement on five centuries of Enghsh verse. My answer is that the following pages contain reports rather of my trial before the poets than of them before me. I have sat at their feet ; and they have required me to say how I have understood them ; what I have learnt from them. So long and intimately I have talked with them, from boyhood till the eventide of life, that somehow I felt bound to render them an account of the lessons they have taught me. I thought I should like, while I could, to tell them and myself results of our companionship. To them I owe the best of my education. Whatever intelligence I possess has been fed, refined, and illuminated by them. Hereafter it will not, I trust, be deemed that I have ill repaid my debt to my benefactors by the present attempt to trace and define their magic. Most of them, early and late, have been my old famiUar friends and confidants. Pleasant, gracious, fragrant memories exhaled from scores of volumes as I successively took them from their shelves to refresh my acquaintance. If the souls enshrined therein look to the intention, I do not fear that they will resent my audacity at caUing the roll. Each of the company as he passed before me has so entirely occupied my attention that I have seldom been VOL. I B 2 THE POETS tempted to draw comparisons. No student of poetry can avoid observing that certain writers tower above the rest. I am not speaking of particular poems. A poem may be great by virtue of the prominence of some special quality : sublimity, as Paradise Lost ; passion, as the Cenci ; hoUness, as The Retreat ; weirdness, as The Raven ; tenderness, as My Mother's Picture ; intensity, as The Tiger ; atmos- phere, as The Eve of St. Agnes ; perfection of workmanship, as Shakespeare's Sonnets. The greatness I mean is a property of men as poets. It belongs to the authors of some of the pieces I have instanced, if not to all. I had begun indeed with a plan for confining my survey to some nineteen great ones. Finally, wliile occasionally I have dis- regarded exact clu-onology, and have grouped authors with reference to analogies in literary character, I decided to abandon altogether assessments of comparative merit. All are peers if endued with the true poetic spirit, in whatever quantity. The Great themselves will have more justice done them, standing among their contemporaries, than in an unconnected gathering of luminaries torn from their native orbits. My only apprehension at first was that I might allow myself to contrast, marshal, even to measure out space with regard to the rank of the tenant in the hierarchy. Of such invidious distinctions I had a superstitious dread. I need not have been anxious. Genius beheld in the midst of its own proper and natural circumstances is invested with a halo too bright to permit a gaze once directed upon it to wander elsewhere, till a fresh name have been duly called. The proportion of room occupied in my pages has no positive relation to my estimate of merit ; much or little has been requisitioned mainly according to the more or less of difficulty in gauging character and quality. THE POETS 3 To one charge I must plead guilty. I avow the fault, but with a sincere sense that I had no alternative. It is unfortunately true that often in my quotations I have made omissions. My apology is twofold. In the first place, the laws of space forbade quotation in full. In the second, the piu-pose for which I quoted permitted, and even encouraged, curtailment. My motive in quoting at all was to explain my admiration of a writer or his work ; to try to prove the inspiration. When, as of necessity often, the inspiration has ceased, the reason for taking up space otherwise required ended too. At the same time I hope to be beheved when I declare that abridging was always a grief to me, and a violence to my instinct of propriety. I have constantly felt that I had to stand in a penitent's wliite sheet after perpetrating such an act, though I had no option but to repeat the offence. If the effect have ever been to set a poet or his verse in too favourable a light, I accept rebuke so entirely without pain that I exult as at the performance of a good deed. Should, by some mischance, the freedoms taken by me have had the opposite consequence of marring a fine touch, I unfeignedly lament. It has been my object throughout to look for achievement, not for failure ; to dwell on beauties, rather than on flaws. Did I suspect that I had been unfair to the least of the seventy-one, whether by omission, or by commission, I should be most unhappy. I have con- sistently inchned to regard high-, not low-water mark. My single endeavour has been to make clear to myself, if possible, the presence of inspiration. That is the quahty I have sought, and endeavoured with all my power to bring to light. I have rejoiced in it when found. For the most part I have gone on my way in silence, when I have not succeeded in discovering it, or have come upon the traces £2 4 THE POETS of it faded or tarnished. If I have indicated poets, or poems, where it is wanting, my object has been to concen- trate regard upon those it glorifies. Where I have been unable to agree with a favourable contemporary view, I have differed with hesitation and doubt as to my own. Only in two or three instances have I presumed to condemn altogether. In general, my surmise is that I am more likely to be held guilty of exaggerated admiration than of censorious severity. I expose myself to the charge almost deliberately, and by no means unwillingly. Let anybody commune with, live with, genuine poetry ; I defy him to refrain from eulogy, which to others not under the spell will seem fantastic. Inspiration acts upon poets hke laughing gas. It has a peculiarity of its own, that mere sympathy communicates the delirium. Perhaps I am rather vain of the liability to a passion of enthusiasm, and invite participation. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 1340?— 1400 Ai^i< springtide. Spring in the suddenness of its succes- sion to winter. Frost and nipping winds at one moment, and, the next, fresh leafage and bright flowers. And the fragrance ! Nothing in the history of literature precisely matches the phenomenon. Mightier Dante himself, incom- parable among moderns till Shakespeare, was not so astoundingly meteoric. His advent was accompanied by a chorus of singers almost as admirable in form, though not in matter. As poetry attended, so it survived, him. Similarly with the marvel of our Enghsh paragon ; Shake- speare had forerunners, rivals, and followers. Geoffrey Chaucer stands alone ; for ancient Gower cannot be named in the same breath ; he was old before he was young. No teachers existed in this island for ' old famous Chaucer V in whose gentle spright The pure well-head of poesie did dwell,- the ' loadstarre of our language ',^ of ' excellencie and wonderful skill in making ',* as witness Spenser, Lydgate, Kirke. No series of disciples handed on the torch. The mere mass of liis writings is vast ; and they were the diversions of an ambassador, soldier, and captive, Controller, perhaps architect, of royal palaces, and a busy courtier, husband of a maid of honour to Queen Pliihppa — the sister of Catherine Swinford. In addition to the Canterbury Tales and many minor pieces, he produced the Romaunt of the Rose, Troilus and Cressida, The Court of Love, Booke of the Dutchesse, House of Fame, Dream, and Legend of Good Women. It is verse by wholesale, though no excess 6 THE POETS of food for the imagination to last a people a century and a half, with no better than Skelton's chopped straw at the end to replenish the manger. A large amount is chaff for us, both stories and sentiments ; not for the fourteenth century, which knew neither Plutarch, nor much of Greek and Roman mythology. The versions of Seneca's moralities and Cato's are weariness to the bones. But there is metal worth delving for amid the prolixities. What wealth of fancy, for example, in the House of Fame ! that feminyne creature, That never formed by nature Was swich another thing y-seye.^ What a store of history, so far as it was accessible to his age, there ; in the Legend of Good Women ; everywhere ! Then, the Tales. Considered severally a proportion of them too may be set down as tedious. As a whole, all, and not least the good Parson's exhaustive sermon, are appropriate, almost necessary, for the presentation of a complete social picture. There is coarseness among them, often humorous, often witty, as in the Wife of Bath's ; oftener unmixed grossness, still characteristic, and needing no apology to the poet's contemporaries, though he himself humbly asks Heaven's pardon for Many a song and many a lecherous lay.'' But take others, the Squire's ' wondrous tale half told ' of Camball and of Algarsif e, the Franklin's of Aurehus Arviragus and Dorigene, above all, the Knight's of Palamon and Arcite, and the Gierke's of Griselda the Patient, the Martyr. They require no extenuation in the face of the twentieth century, any more than in that of their own. The exquisite lights and shadows of the mortal love-duel at Athens are a masterpiece of poetic art. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 7 Tlie subsidiary characters are allowed their due shares of importance ; for example, the royal allies of the two principals ; Palamon's — Licurge himself the grete king of Trace ; Blak was his herd, and manly was his face, The cercles of his eyen in his heed They gloweden bitwaxe yelow and reed And lyk a griffon loked he aboute, With kempe heres on his browes stoute. And as the gyse was in his contree, Ful hye upon a char of gold stood he. A Wiethe of gold arm-great, of huge wighte, Upon his heed set ful of stones bright. Aboute his char ther went -en \vhyte alaunts, Twenty and mo, as grete as any stere. To hunten at the leoun or the deer. An hundred lordes hadde he in his route. Armed full wel, with hertes sterne and stoute. and Arcite's : The grete Emetraeus the king of Inde, Came ryding lyk the god of armes. Mars. His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars, Couched with perles whyte and rounde and grete. His sadel was of brend gold newe ybete ; A mantelet upon his shuldre hanging Bret-ful of rubies rede, as fyx sparklinge. His nose was heigh, his eyen bright citryn. His Uppes rounde, his colour was sanguyn. And as a leoun he his loking caste. Of fyve and twenty yeer his age I caste. His herd was wel bigonne for to springe. His voys was as a trompe thunderinge. An hundred lordes hadde he with him there. All armed, sauf hir heddes, in all hir gere. Aboute this king ther ran on every part Ful many a tame leoun and lepart.'' But the rivals occupy, as is fitting, the forefront of the scene ; and above even them shines the lady of their S THE POETS love and strife. On a bright May morning dawns upon us : Emelye, that fairer was to sene Than is the liUe upon his stalke grene, And fressher than the May with floures newe — For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe, I noot which was the fairer of hem two — Er it were day, as was hir wone to do, She was arisen, and al redy dight ; For May wol have no slogardye a-night. Yclothed was she fresh, for to devyse. Hire yelow heer was broyded in a tresse, Behind hir bak, a yerde long I gesse, And in the gardin, at the sonne upriste, She walketh up and doun, and as hir Uste. She gadereth floures, party whyte and rede, To make a sotil gerland for hir hede, And as an aungel hevenly she song.** It is in full accordance with chivalrous romance that finally she allows herseK to be the prize, passed from hand to hand, of the deadly tournament. Not a stain rests on her maidenly dignity. She knew each knight to be a right worthy bridegroom and lord. Only second to Palamon and Arcite is the Gierke's Tale. Admirable for the literary art is the remorselessness of the touches of red-hot iron applied to Griselda's spirit, without defacement of it, or of her womanly self-respect — with never the absence from readers of a sense of suppressed tears in the narrator as he tortures her ; of an eagerness in themselves to make the most of any liint of ' routhe and pitee ' in the diseased soul of the suspicious, barbarous Marquis himself, notwithstanding that he was ful faste imagining If by his wyves chere he might see, Or by hir word aperceive that she Were chaunged, but he never coud hir finde, But ever in oon ylyke sad and kinde. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 9 ' Kinde ', but ' sad '. Yet with none of the anger against fate of her peasant father, or of her husband's people wliom she had made to love her. When she is driven forth, naked except for her smock, to return to her liumble cottage : The folk hire folwe weping in hir wey, And fortune ay they cursen as they goon ; But she fro weping kepte hir yen dreye, Ne in this tyme word ne spak she noon. Hir fader, that this tyding herde anoon, Curseth the day and tyme that nature Shoop him to been a lyves creature. Agayne his dochter hastihch goth he, For he by noyse of folk knew hir cominge, And with hir olde cote, as it mighte be. He covered hir, ful sorwefully wepinge.'-' If any are inchned to accompany the poor old villager in cursing as well as tears, I am afraid it is of no use for me to pray them not to extend their wrath to the poet, who is careful to explain the moral of the story to be, not so much excessive wifely humiUty, as that every wight, in his degree, Should be constant in adversitee ; with a warning to a modern husband to putte nat his wyf in greet assay, This world is nat so strong, it is no nay, As it hath been in olde tymes yore.'° For myself I must confess to having always wondered how long after the Satanic ordeal — whatever is alleged of ' many a yere ', and ' rest ' — Petrarch and Chaucer meant the victim's worn heart-chords to keep from snapping in revolt at the ironic splendours of her restored palace ! 10 THE POETS Pathos, mirth, subtlety, and learning, alternating or together, pervade the Tales. They have the dewy freshness of meadows and woods. Birds sing in them. It is Fairy- land, into which now and again a Bottom has wandered. In the Prologues, at the postern gates as well as in the grand portal, a panorama is exhibited in miniature of the now English people, and its awaking life. I do not know where else in poetry so complete, so animated a kinemato- graph of the classes constituting a nationality is to be found. They are all there with their distinctive gradations of character as finely delineated as if Shakespeare had been the limner. If souls transmigrate, his indeed might have lived before in Chaucer. All the portraits are delightful ; the knight : That fro the tyme that he first bigan To ryden out, he loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie. Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre, And thereto had he riden, no man ferre, As wel in Cristendom as in hethenesse, And ever honoured for his worthinesse. And evermore he hadde a sovereyn prys. And though that he were worthy he was wys, And of his port as meke as is a mayde. He never yet no vileynye ne sayde In al his \ji, unto no maner wight. He was a verray parfit gentil knight ; " the Prioress, ful simple and coy, Hir grettest ooth was but by Seynt Loy ; And she was cleped Madame Eglentyne. Ful wel she songe the service divyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the Scole of Stratford attc Bowe, For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowc. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 11 She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde wepe if that she sawe a mo us Caught in a trappe, if it were dad or bledde. Of smale houndes had she, that she fedde With rosted fiesh, and milk, and wastel breed. But sore wept she if oon of hem were deed, Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte : And all was conscience and tendre herte.'^ the Monk : A manly man, to been an abbot able. Ful many a deyntee hors hadde he in stable ; And, whan he rood, men mighte his brydel here Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere, And eke as loude, as dooth the chapel-belle, Ther as this lord was keper of the celle ; ^^ the young Squire, of dames, as well as of his father, to whom he was a ' lowly, servisable ' son ; the Wife of Bath ; the Sergeant of the Lawe, war and wys ; the prosperous Franklin : Wei loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn ; a Clerk of Oxenforde, as lean as his horse, on a diet chiefly of logic ; the Miller ; the Sompnour ; and many other representatives of Enghsh Plantagenet hfe, especially the ecclesiastical, with, to crown the whole : A good man of religioun. And was a povre Persoun of a toun ; But riche he was of holy thoght and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche. His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche. Benigne he was, and wonder diUgent, And in adversitee ful pacient ; And swich he was y-preved ofte sj^hes, Ful looth were him to cursen for his tythes, 12 THE POETS And rather wolde he yeven out of doute. Unto his poure parisshens aboute Of his ofring, and eke of his substaunce. He coude in Utel thing han suffisaunce. Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer asonder. But he ne lafte nat for reyn ne thonder, In siknes nor in meschief to visite The ferreste in his parissh, muche and lyte, Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf. This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf, That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte. Out of the gospel he the wordes caughte. And this figure he added esk therto That if gold ruste, what shal iren do ? For if a preest be foule, on whom we truste, No wonder is a lewed man to ruste ; Well oghte a preest ensample for to yive, By his clenenesse, how his sheep shold live. He sette not his benefice to hyre, And leet his sheep enombred in the myre, And ran into London, unto sgynt Poules, To seken him a chaunterie for soules, Or with a brotherhed to been withold ; But dwelt at hoom, and kepte wel his folde. So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie ; He was a shepherde, and no mercenarie. And though he holy were, and vertuous, He was to sinful men nat despitous, Ne of his speche daungerous ne digne. But in his teching discreet and benigne. To drawen folk to hevenly fairnesse ; By good ensample, was his bisinesse ; But it were any persone obstinat, What so he were, of heigh or lowe estat. Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones. A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon is. He wayted after no pompe and reverence, Ne maked him no spyced conscience, But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, He taughte, and first he folwed it himselve ; GEOFFREY CHAUCER 13 as did also his brotlier, a Plowman : God loved he best with al his hole herte At alle tjrmes, thogh him gamed or smerte, And thamie his neighebour right as himselve. He wolde thressh, and therto dyke, and delve, For Cristes sake, for every povre wight, Withouten hyre, if it lay in his might.''' Admiration is not to be sought for Chaucer by way of alms, with a kind of compassionate indulgence for him as phenomenal for liis period. In work like the Prologue, The Knight's and Clerk's Tales, enthusiasm is the work's right. If I speak of the work rather than always of the writer individually, it is that I economize miracles. Such creations, not leaves and blossoms alone, but ripe fruit also, would have been impossibilities had they not been maturing beneath the surface. They issued from no wilderness. The soil was of courtly manners, of cliivalrous, high-bred sentiment. Norman exclusiveness, in crumbhng into Saxon mother- earth, had carried thither dignity and grace. Though Enghsli hterature hitherto had reckoned for little, French was accessible to Englishmen. The language itself was daily being embroidered with French diction and its larger ideas. Besides, there was always Italy. Dante had just been. Petrarch and Boccaccio were. Every usurping Italian prelate, every wandering friar, every returned noble, pilgrim, and merchant was an evangelist of the new gospel of letters. Centuries were to pass before writers, of whatever race, were ashamed to borrow plots and thoughts. Chaucer, as he tells us everjrwhere, drank deep of the open fountains, and gloried in his draughts from them. We cannot tell what he would have been without them. He turned them, as he slaked his thirst, with happier results than King Midas, into virgin gold. His merit, in their 14 THE POETS transmutation, in his borrowings of ideas and tone from a half-French Court, in his acceptance of foreign enrich- ments of his native tongue, is large enough for his admirers to be content to extol him, not for making his tools, but for his use of them. There he wrought miracles indeed. He found the nation divided by a barrier of two spoken lan- guages. Operating from an Enghsh heart and brain for English ears, he compelled the whole to understand one tongue. Enghsh verse cannot be said to have really existed before him. He composed poems which through all the inter- vening centuries have never ceased to be read and loved. The rhythm he planted struck root so deeply that it has never lost its hold on the national ear. Dryden and Pope tried to improve upon it. Read their monotonously measured heroics, in their so-called translations, before or after the original, in its natural changefulness, and judge which is the more musical. I am almost tempted to add, which is the more intelligible. Whatever the amount of his debts to continental htera- ture, one constituent of his work Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, with the entire bounteous French tongue thrown in, could not have supphed. He contributed liimseK ; his own spacious nature. That is visible throughout story, learning, diction, and thought. It animates and transforms the whole. His curiosity was devouring. He must have read whatever in contemporary or classical hterature was for the period available. Through his reading he endeavoured to live back into the past. It may be admitted that he made at times a strange medley of his knowledge. Greek and Roman gods and goddesses ply, as it were, for reverence and worship along with the mysteries of the Christian Faith. Legend, history, and mythology, Caesar and Aeneas, Ovid and Titus Livius, are used as of equal authority for the GEOFFREY CHAUCER 15 reconstruction of antiquity. The results may sometimes be grotesque ; they compose a fabric in which at any rate Chaucer, with his pubhc, felt at home ; even enraptured and on wings : On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And in myn herte have hem in reverence ; And to hem yeve I swich lust and swich credence, That ther is wel unethe game noon, That from my bokes make me to goon. Only one other joy takes precedence of his homage to them. It is in the joly tyme of May Whan that I here the smale foules singe. And that the floures ginne for to springe. Then Farwel my studie, as lasting that sesoun ! '•' In that sweet month he feels hke the birds. They that han left hir song Whyl they han suffred cold so strong, In wedres grille, and derke to sight, Ben in May, for the sonne brighte, So glade, that they shewe in singing, That in hir herte is swich lyking. That they mote singen and be light. Hard is his herte that loveth nought In May, whan al this mirth is wrought. Whan he may on these braunches here The smale briddes singen clere Hir blisful swete song pitous, And in this sesoun delytous.^*' He loves all Nature's works, great and small, and, best among them, the simple and humble : Of alle the floures in the mede Than love I most these floures whyie and rede, Swiche as men callen daysies in our toun. To hem I have so great affeccion, 16 THE POETS As I seyde erst, whan comen is the May, That in my bed ther daweth me no day That I ram up, and walking in the mede To seen these floures agein the Sonne sprede. Whan hit upryseth erly by the morwe ; That bhsful sighte softneth al my sorwe.^'' A gale of fresh, dewy fragrance from green grass, and lowly flowers breathes over the inspirations he has borrowed from the great of Italy, and naturalizes the whole on English soil. Spirit and thought are equally delightful. The singer is so manifestly, so piquantly, joyous. His glad surprise at finding the numbers come infects his audience. A bystander cannot help rejoicing with him. Yet Black Death had been devastating the cities. Wars of royal ambition had been watering foreign fields with the blood of thousands. Ex- cessive taxation had driven labourers and farmers into armed sedition. Religion and conscience had their pro- found upheavals. The poet, among his divers moods, preserved unsuUied that of a sweet equanimity. He ceased not, at due seasons, to write, and even laugh, though his heart had ached. A keen satirist who hated all mockery, he had a smile for individual prioresses and friars, even for sompnours and pardoners, while he lashed the system by wliicli they fattened. The courage of the courtier, who could thus defy the Church a short generation before it burnt Cobham at the stake must have been undaunted. How he could honour and love ministers of that Church who were Christians also, we can gather from his adorable picture of a poure Persone of the toun. Altogether English poetry could want no nobler pro- genitor than Geoffrey Chaucer. How he sliines in the light of his own halo against a curtain of darkness behind, and a darkness almost blacker to come ! GEOFFREY CHAUCER 17 The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, cditeil by the Rev. W. VV. Skeat, Litt.D. 7 vols. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1894. 1 G. Kirke, Dedication of Shepheard's Calendar. * The Faerie Queene, Canto vii, st. 9. * John Lydgate. * G. Kirke, supra. * The Hous of Fame, vv. 1365-7. " The Persones Tale, § 104, 1085. ■ The Knightes Tale, vv. 2129-54 and 2156-86. » Ibid. 1035-55. » The Clerkes Tale, vv. 8475-80 and 8871-88. Tercia pars, vv. 598- 602, and Quinta pars, vv. 897-903 and 911-14. 1" Ibid., Pars sexta, vv. 1145-6 and 1138-40. " Prologue, vv. 43-50 and 67-72 '- Ibid., vv. 119-26 and 143-50. » Ibid., vv. 167-72. " Ibid., vv. 477-528, and 533-5. '' Legend of Good Women, Prologue, vv. 30-9. !'■ Romaunt of the Rose, vv. 70-89. " Legend of Good Women, Prologue, vv. 41-50. VOL. I SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 1554—1586 Even for poets it is an honour for the Enghsh Bayard to be reckoned of their fraternity. He himself never denied his vocation, though, after the manner of the age, he apologized for ' having I know not by what mischance, in these my not old years and idlest times, slipped into the title of a poet '.^ His own and several succeeding generations enthusiastically acknowledged his poetic merits. By the ordinary modern reader, wliile his name for chivalrous virtues and accom- phshments has become a proverb, he is not known to have existed as a poet at all. The indiscriminateness of the neglect is the more sur- prising for the character of the fugitive pieces, which he scattered among his friends and associates, never heeding whether they died, or hved, and under whatever name. They are commonly of the bright and joyous character which might have been expected to echo long. Take for instance : O faire ! swete ! when I do look on thee. In whome all joyes so well agree. Heart and soul do sing in me. Just accord all musicke makes ; In thee just accord excelleth, Where each part in such peace dwelleth. One of other beauty takes, Since, then, truth to all mindes teUeth That in thee lives harmonic, Heart and soul do sing in me.^ I should have supposed that the address to Love even was too airy, too unsubstantial, for the heavy foot of Time to overtake and crush it : SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 19 Ah, poore Love, whi dost thou live, Thus to see thy service lost ? Ife she will no comforte geve, Make an end, yeald up the goaste ; That she may at lengthe aprove That she hardlye long beleved. That the hart will die for love That is not in tyme relieved. Ohe that ever I was borne. Service so to be refused, FaythfuU love to be foreborne ! Never love was so abused.'* The mere sauciness ought to have guaranteed agamst superannuation the repeated entreaties to the cross-grained babe to sleep, and let its mother keep her tryst, not, I am afraid, with the infant's father. So too with the mocking of a pusillanimous lover : Doth she chide ? 'Tis to shew it That thy coldness makes her do it Is she silent ? is she mute '! Silence fully grants thy sute ; Doth she pout, and leave the room ? / Then she goes to bid thee come ; Is she sick ? why then be sure She invites thee to the cure ; Doth she cross thy sute with No ? Tush, she loves to hear thee woo ; Doth she call the faith of man In question ? nay, 'uds-foot, she love thee than ; He that after ten denialls Dares attempt no farther tryals, Hath no warrant to acquire The dainties of his chaste desire.* The generations one or two removes from his own had not in any case the curiosity to ransack hospitals of Uterary foundlings, on the chance of identifying the dainty creatures C 2 20 THE POETS of his imagination. They knew, and had tired, of the subtlety and intricate thoughtful ness of the poems he acknowledged. The neglect has for centuries been a sad waste of precious matter ; for he never wrote without striving to put into liis work the best of himself according to his prevailing mood and subject. When his pen and they really suited each other, the result is exquisite in its own sort. The Arcadia, amid a mass of preposterous affecta- tion, often breaks into loveliness. How charmingly, for instance, a shepherd's suspicion of sorcery becomes a tribute of adoration to the fascination of the sorceress : When I see her, my sinewes shake for feare, And yet, deare soule, I know she hurteth none ; Amid my flocke with woe my voice I teare, And, but bewitch'd, who to his flocke would mone ? Her chery lips, milke hands, and golden haire I still doe see, though I be still alone.*^ Here is a sweet rustic epitaph on a tomb of lovers twain, the one incapable of surviving the other : His being was in her alone ; And he not being, she was none. They joy'd one joy, one grief they griev'd ; One love they lov'd, one life they hv'd. The hand was one, one was the sword That did his death, her, death afford. As all the rest, so now the stone That tombes the two is justly one." Zelmane's extraordinarily detailed inventory of Fhiloclea's charms in some hundred and fifty verses, ends with the prettiest analysis of the fair one's hand : Of my first love the fatall band, Where whiteness doth for ever sit ; Nature herself enameld it ; SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 21 For there with strange compact doth He Warm snow, moist pearle, soft ivorie ; There fall those saphir-coloured brookes, Which conduit-hke with curious crookes Sweet ilands make in that sweet land. As for the fingers of the hand, The bloody shafts of Cupid's warre. With amatists they headed are. Thus hath each part his beautie's part ; But how the graces doe impart To all her limmes a special grace, Becoming every time and place, Which doth even beautie beautifie. And most bewitch the wretched eye : — How all this is but a fair inne Of fairer guests, which dwell therein : — Of whose high praise and praisefuU blisse Goodness the penne, heaven paper is ; The inke immortall fame doth lend : — As I began so must I end : No tongue can her perfections tell. In whose each part all tongues may dwell.'' But Astrophel and Stella is the production by which Sidney may most adequately claim in these times to be judged as a poet ; and there by its main constituents. In the ten songs interspersed the wooer is delightfully ingenious in arriving by as many different roads at one same conclu- sion : This small wind, which so sweete is, See how it the leaves doth kisse ; Each tree in his best attiring, Sense of love to love inspiring. Love makes earth the water drink, Love to earth makes water sinkc ; And, if dumbe things be so witty. Shall a heavenly grace want pitty ? " 22 THE POETS It was into its Sonnets, however, that he threw his full strength. Of the whole hundred and eight it is no exaggera- tion to say that they will stand comparison, if not with an incomparable dozen, with the rest of Shakespeare's, The famous thirty-first, with a little less wit, and a little more feeling, would be perfect : With how sad steps, Moone, thou clim'st the skies ! How silently, and with how wanne a face ! What, may it be that even in heavenly place That busie archer his sharpe arrowes tries ! Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case, I reade it in thy lookes ; thy languisht grace, To me, that feele the like, thy state discries. Then, e'en of fellowship, O Moone, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit ? Are beauties there as proud as here they be ! Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorne whom that love doth possesse ? Doe they call vertue there ungratefulnesse In another the personal element captivates : Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce Guided so well that I obtained the prize, Both by the judgment of the Enghsh eyes And of some sent from that sweet enemy Fraunce ; Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advaunce, Towne folkes my strength ; a daintier judge applies His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise ; Some luckie wits impute it but to chance ; Others, because of both sides I doe take My blood from them who did excell in this, Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make. How farre they shot awrie ! the true cause is, Stella lookt on, and from her heavenly face Sent forth the beames which made so faire my race." His heart, habituallv humble and abashed in Stella'a SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 23 presence, is speedily intoxicated witli a passing sense of freedom : My Starre, because a sugred kisse In sport I suckt while she asleepe did lye, Doth lowre, nay chide, nay threat for only this ! Sweet, it was saucie Love, not humble I. But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appeare In Beautie's throne : see now, who dares come neare Those scarlet judges, threatening bloudie paine. heav'nly foole, thy most kisse-worthy face Anger invests with such a lovely grace. That Anger's selfe I needs must kisse againe." A stray ringlet at once shames the Mistress and enraptures her Servant : happie Thames, that didst my Stella beare ! 1 saw thee with full many a smiling line Upon thy cheerfull face, Joye's livery weare, While those faire planets on thy streames did shine. The boate for joy could not to daunce forbear, While wanton winds, with beauties so divine Ravisht, staid not, till in her golden haire They did themselves, O sweetest prison, twine. And faine those Aeol's youth there would their stay / Have made, but forst by Nature still to flie, First did with puffing kisse those lockes display ! She, so dishevelled, blusht : from window I With sight thereof cride out, ' faire disgrace. Let Honor's selfe to thee grant highest place.' ^" And then, suddenly, in the midst of the amorous frolic, figuring as a mere tag to the gay trifling, starts up a big thought : I give you here my hand for truth of this, — Wise silence is best musicke unto bhsse.'^ In that capacious province of Enghsh verse occupied by the Sonnet, it would be hard to discover more than one or two series to place by the side of Astrophel and Stella. 24 THE POETS Single surpassing specimens, I am aware, could be cited ; among them, that by Sidney himself in the collection known as Sidera : Oft have I musde, but now at length I finde Why those that die, men say they do depart : Depart ! a word so gentle to my minde, Weakely did seeme to paint Death's ougly dart. But now the starres, with their strange course, do binde Me one to leave, with whom I leave my heart ; I heare a cry of spirits fainte and bUnde That parting thus, my chiefest part I part. Part of my life, the loathed part to me. Lives to impart my wearie clay some breath ; But that good part wherein all comforts be. Now dead, doth shew departure is a death ; Yea, worse than death ; death parts both woe and joy. From joy I part, still living in annoy. '^ But few clusters vie with the other. It is miniature painting of a consummate kind ; delicate tracery of all conceivable emotions of the persons in the given circum- stances principally concerned — the friend, the lover, the mistress, all, that is, but the husband. The colours, mixed more, it is true, with brain than heart, still are of real passion for the time being, evoked by an effort of will. Doubtless, the entire shining structure is a palace of ice, a mirage in the desert. At all events it is extra- ordinarily artistic and symmetrical. Given the latitude of speech and feeling in the period, it is moral also. Sidney in a dissolute age was no libertine. None in his own time believed that he cherished designs against the honour of Essex's sister, his own once promised bride, now the neglected wife of a titled clown. The generous purpose of the poems may well have been to console, exalt the victim, by representing her with all her charms as SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 25 bravely faithful to vows her husband liad not kept, as resisting triumphantly temptation, however noble, ardent, and dear the tempter. The present inabihty of Sidney's verse to attract readers is not flattering to modern taste, in view of its intrinsic merits. The failure is not astonishing when the change in the hterary standpoint is considered. Modern poetry labours to turn the stream of its especial subject into the channel of common human nature. It was Browning's object as much as Tennyson's. It is the only receipt in literature for evading superannuation. From Sidney to Waller, the aim was to individuahze emotions equally with manners. The theme was enclosed in a private pool, where every incident of its being, and growth, could not fail to be remarked. When it is in itself worthy, and the observer has sympathy and soul to analyse its properties, it proves to be still a pearl of price. In default of the rightful combination, much in Sidney, sometliing in a greater genius, everything in a pile of more ordinary Elizabethan and Jacobean verse, appears to be nothing but a collection of ingenious grotesques. Elizabethan love-poetry, in its beauties and its paradoxes, is paralleled by the sacred poetry of the following generation. With a fit infusion of sensibility and passion both sorts become for the student delightfully extraordinary. Without the addition they are extraordinary without the dehghtfulness. Fashion is as omnipotent, except for an occasional rebel, in literature as in social habits and customs. In the golden days of Elizabeth, and a generation or two later, it decreed that poetry, other than dramatic, should be the diversion and the privilege of a few, of scholars and the Court. Shakespeare himself, in his character of poet, obeyed the edict. Had he been born noble and wealthy, with no 26 THE POETS compulsion to be intelligible to a multitude, he possibly might have preferred throughout the honours of a sonneteer to the immortality of the creator of Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Hamlet. Sidney, a courtier, admired, beloved, a poet born, was free to choose. He had studied, and, though he selects for praise Troilus and Cressida — not the Canterbury Tales — panegyrizes — notwithstanding ' great wants ' ^^ — Chaucer, the people's poet, if ever there was one. He ' never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that he found not his heart moved more than with a trumpet '." Yet he could not oppose fashion's ordinance on the legitimate purpose and aspiration of sonnet and song. He was content to set him- self as poet the task of hymning his mistress's eyebrow. The applause most valued in his period, his lady's and the Court's, he won. He has paid for it by having become in popular opinion as antiquated as a farthingale. Whether he had it in him to be a singer for all time, as is his illustrious contemporary in the lyrics of the Plays, none can declare. That contemporary himself did not essay to be at once musical and spontaneous, unless with a people's drama for a vehicle to carry and excuse poetry not a la mode. We can only wish that Sidney had tried. The poetic school which was Sidney's died a natural death more than two centuries ago. Whether in Italy, France, Spain, or England, it originated in a world of less diffused intellectual atmosphere and friction than ours ; in a world where the wheels turned more slowly round ; in a more contracted circle of possible appreciation, but where any was tenfold more intense for the narrowness. The self- dedicated poet had no ambition for his own Muse to ' move as with a trumpet '. He was not solicitous to be recited in the highways. Rather he desired that fair ladies and cavaliers might whisper to each other his graceful conun- SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 27 drums in boudoirs — or, better, debate them in the asyhims of their own breasts. Modern revivals are make-beheves. No heart-strings have been ravelled into knots. There is no mistress. The intent is, not to enchant a few, but to puzzle and amaze the many. The pieces are mere metrical exercises, ghosts of a dead past, barren of all sincerity. For the moment, in the brief intervals of repose from tourna- ments, war, the ambushes of statecraft, and Court intrigues, Sidney was sincere enough. In a sense he was even natural ; the sworn antagonist of Euphuism, that reductio ad absurdum of the type of hterature which was his own. Never was there a keener instinct for grace, beauty, heroism. Before we condemn Astrophel and Stella — perhaps, the Arcadia itself — for faults equally apparent throughout undramatic Elizabethan verse, let us seek to match Sidney's as a whole for intrinsic merits at the date of its production with any since Chaucer's — and we shall fail. The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Rev. A. B. Grosart (Early English Poets). 3 vols. Chatto and Windus, 1877. ' Defence of Poesy. 2 Verses, To the Tune of a Spanish Song (Pansies from Penshnrst and Wilton), viii, st. 2. ^ Love, V (Ibid.). ' Wooing-stuff, vi. ^ Arcadia, Lamon's Song, x. " Ibid., Argalns and Parthenia, 42. ' Zelmane, of Philoclea, xvii, vv, 122-46. * Astrophel and Stella, viii, stanzas 15-16. ' Ibid. 31. 1" Ibid. 41. » Ibid. 73. i= Ibid. 103. '^ Ibid. 70. ^* A Farewell (Sidera), v. '^ Defence of Poesy. '« Ibid. EDMUND SPENSER 1553—1599 ' Linked sweetness long drawn out ' ; that is the accepted judgement on Spenser. By estabhshed literary edict, still unrevoked, the foundation stones of modern English poetry are Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Milton keeps his place. Shakespeare has deepened, widened, his. Spenser, recognized as a classic, is become a dowager of the British Parnassus ; honoured, and unread. Not one in a thousand readers takes his volumes from the shelf. At the same time, all would be ashamed to avow ignorance of them. His verse has ceased to give pleasure, unless to the poetically-minded — in these days a diminishing class. For the educated Englishman in general the Epithalamion is high-flown ; the Faerie Queene is interminable. He had the vice, for our hurried times unpardonable, of prohxity. Continually he offends readers by appearing to put no faith in their ability to supply details. In reality he could not bear not to picture the whole scene to himself, not to see the Bright Scolopendraes arm'd with silver scales, Mighty Monoceroses with immeasured tayles.' While he prays for sympathy in liis labours : O ! what an endlesse work have I in hand ! '^ his public is wishing he had spared much of liis pains in compassion for its own. Macaulay's profane blessing on the shipwreck, negligence, or conflagration, which saved literature from a supplement to the existing seventy-two or eighty cantos of the romance of as many more, has often been echoed with interest. EDMUND SPENSER 29 Few of liis adiniiers can deny that liib iinmoital work would have been the better for less copiousness in language, for less facihty in versification. His heavenly gift of fancy itself, as onwards it far'd as dauncing in delight. might have been yet diviner had it known an occasional pause. Frequently it is hard to see the wood for the trees. In his Irish solitude his pure mind was haunted by visions more voluptuous than tempted the hermit of the Thebaid. He piled up Ossas on Pelions of gorgeous palaces only fit to be tenanted by fairest damsels rich attir'd With golden hands and silver feete beside. Perilous adventui'e jostles adventure, carcases, generally to be raised to hfe, are heaped on carcases, horror on horror, heroism on heroism, until the brain reels bewildered. More- over, the suspicion of allegory troubles the interest of the story ; the archaic language also ; besides that, borrowing archaisms, he is never frankly archaic. Worst of all, or withal, we miss in the professed disciple of Chaucer the open- air, the nature, the directness, of the Master. There the root is of the explanation of the present cold- ness towards perhaps the most poetical of British poets. While the same cause existed always, for sufficient reasons it did not operate equally of old. For liis own, and several generations to follow, wliich never learnt to read Shake- speare, he was the fountain of romance. Every deed of terror, self-sacrifice, conceived by minstrels, forged by monkish chroniclers, he idealized, and embalmed in honeyed verse. Imagination, the reader's as well as the writer's, wandered about a limitless, enchanted forest-Paradise, or beckoned and wantoned through vistas, hardly less lovely, 30 THE POETS of Hell. A pageant dazzling in the framework, gloriously fantastic in the incidents ! To Ms immediate contemporaries, as to himself, it was half real. His friends were ever prepared to scorn- the Spanish Main for spoil. Hundreds were pining, writhing, in dungeons of the Inquisition. A legion was fighting for the pure Faith in the Netherlands. Spaniards were raiding Galway, Wild Irishry furnished a permanent background. "We see in liis View of the Present State of Ireland, how he would have dealt with it, have clenched a mail hand, and in no velvet glove. ^ Actual dangers and guerdons were not altogether unHke, outside the Christian symbohsm, to those encountered and won by the Red Cross knight, by Sir Guyon, Britomartis, Cambel, Aitegall, Sir Calidore. Gloriana's champions were as fierce in spirit, pillaged and massacred giants and Paynim as ruthlessly, as EHzabeth's buccaneers despoiled and butchered Dons and Desmonds. Creatures of Spenser's brain and his royal Mistress's favour held identical commissions to enter in and possess the gate of Antichrist. The great poem satisfied other instincts and cravings in the century of civil discord which succeeded. It inspired the twelve-year-old genius of Cowley. In hundreds of manor houses and parsonages its many pages must have afforded a bhssf ul asylum from the babel of opposing creeds and party strifes. It was a welcome rehef, during the Commonwealth, to sour Puritanism, and the Blatant Beast, and, at the Restoration, to the sensual allurements of Archimago. During the interregnum for poetry, of the Georgian Era, that long Dunciad, it was still heard protesting, and not in vain. The deadliest blow against popular favour for Spenser was struck, less by national insensibility, than by the growing friction of life. His poetry could not have been born amid prosaic modern EDMUND SPENSER 31 turmoil, competition of ambitions, topics, and interests. For appreciation it wants mental leism'e, and some ap- proach to a monopoly of it. When now, by accident, or in shame, a volume is opened, it is galloped through, prodigy of knight-errantry after prodigy. The varying hghts and shades are all confused and blurred. Work hke Spenser's ought to be read lovingly, as Ralegh, or as Words- worth, faithful to him in age as in youth, would have read him. Such minutes of a day are, if any, given to him now as can be stolen from a month's supply of new hterature which would have sufficed once for a reign. Yet none of us who would derive true profit from poetry can afford to be bhnd to the hght of so particular a star in the poetic firmament as Spenser. He reigns over a kingdom of his own. Whatever theme he touches bears the impress of his pecuhar genius ; and many themes were touched by him. Love he traces though all its manifold phases. Like all the poets of his time he worships at the shrine ; but always with purity : Fayre is my Love, when her fajre golden haires With the loose wynd ye waving chance to niarke ; Fayre when the rose in her red cheekes appeares ; Or m her eyes the fyre of love does sparke. Fayre, when her breast, lyke a rich laden barke, With pretious merchandise she forth doth lay ; Fayre, when that cloud of pryde, which oft doth dark Her goodly hght, with smiles she drives away. But fayrest she, when so she doth display The gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight, Through which her words so wise do make their way To beare the message of her gentle spright. The rest be works of Natui'e's wonderment ; But this the worke of hart's astonishment.^ Even in an Epithalamion, a class of composition in which 32 THE POETS the most decorous fancy was apt to run wild, his joyousness is never riotous : Wake now, my Love, awake ; for it is time ; The rosy Mome long since left Tithon's bed, All ready to her silver coche to clyme ; And Phoebus 'gins to shew his glorious hed Hark ! how the cheerefuU birds do chaunt their iaies. And caroU of Love's praise. The merry Larke his mattins sings aloft ; The Thrush replyes ; the Mavis descant playes ; The Ousell shrills ; the Ruddock warbles soft ; So goodly all agree, with sweet consent. To this dayes merriment. Ah ! my deere Love, why doe ye sleep thus long, When meeter were that ye should now awake, T' awayt the comming of your joyous Make, And hearken to the birds love-learned song. The deawy leaves among ! For they of joy and pleasance to you sing. That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring.^ Beauty he passionately adniued ; beauty apparent to the senses — cheeks, hly white and rose red — hair, Mke golden wire — eyes, sparkling stars — Comming to kisse her lyps — such grace I found — Me seemd, I smelt a gardin of sweet fioures. That dainty odours from them threw around. For damzells fit to decke their lovers bowres.*' It was his mistress from whom they breathed ; and he revelled in them ; yet delighting in all such transient charms chiefly as emblems of the inner lamp, immortally fair. It, from whose celestiaU ray That hght proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire, Shall never be extinguisht nor decay; But when the vitall spirits doe expyre, Unto her native planet shall retyre ; EDMUND SPENSER 33 For it is heavenly borne and cannot die, Being a parcell of the purest skie. For when the soule, the which derived was, At first, out of that great immortall Spright, By whom all hve to love, whilome did pas Doun from the top of purest heavens bright To be embodied here, it then took light And Uvely spirits from that fayrest starre Which lights the world forth from his firie carre.'^ So habitual indeed was it for him to seek the celestial in the earthly that, when we pass from the hymn in honour of Beauty visible to human sight, to hymns of heavenly love and heavenly beauty, we are not conscious of any essential change in the spirit of the treatment. Similarly we have no sense of heterogeneousness or abruptness, when a record of My love's conquest, peerlesse beauties prise,* elbows the grand Easter psalm : Most glorious Lord of lyfe ! that, on this day. Didst make thy triumph over death and sin ; And, having harrow'd hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win : This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin ; And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dy. Being with thy deare blood clene washt from sin, May live for ever in feUcity ! And that thy love we weighing worthily. May Ukewise love thee for the same againe ; And for thy sake, that all lyke deare didst buy, With love may one another entertayne : So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought ; Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.^ No poet has ever held a more exalted view of the dignity of his vocation. He proved it by liis constant tendency to lift his subject, whatever it might be, from the dust to the stars. His poems, one and all, testify to a vast expenditure VOL. I D 34 THE POETS of care and thought. They require as much from their readers, and affection also. In truth it is sheer waste of mental effort to get him up for the purposes of polite con- versation, or even as if to satisfy a Civil Service Examiner. He must — in any of his work — be read for pleasure in the harmony of diction and spirit ; in the Faerie Queene also for that enjoyment, if possible, of the romance, which a child might still take, apart from the archaisms. I used, when a boy, to be told that Sir Frederick Thesiger, a power- ful advocate, if less eminent as a Chancellor, would every morning attune his mind to forensic oratory by committing to memory one or two of Spenser's stanzas. That is the proper temper ; and the poet will reward it. Every poem he penned is a treasure house of imagery and of language. To understand the flexibiUty of Enghsh, its aptness for the expression of myriad turns of thought and feeling, all, but especially poets, should study him. The distinctive feature of his Muse is the evenness, the pervading sweetness. Take your chance anywhere in the labyrinth of dulcet verse, redolent of more than Itahan daintiness; and you will light upon none false. Not that, for sympathetic readers, there is a sense of stagnation. You are plodding through a thick undergrowth of strange deeds ; suddenly a lark mounts through the stages of air, and is trilHng over- head. Now and again an exquisite idea, scene, phrase, stands out ; a gust of melody ; of tener in the shorter poems than in the Faerie Queene, though occasionally there too. For instance, we pluck a flower like this in the garden of Acrasia : The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefuU shade, Their notes under the voice attempered sweet ; Th' AngeHcall soft trembUng voyces made To th' instrument? divine respondence meet ; EDMUND SPENSER 35 The silver sounding instruments did meet With the base murmurs of the waters fall ; The waters fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.'° Absolute music ! Aiid it is not as if here and there some soUtary islet of beauty emerged. A numerous company hke to it are rising everywhere just above a flood of all but equal meUifluousness. Coral rocks with palm trees on them are seen for a moment, then disappear in the haze of an ever-rolling ocean, to be succeeded by others as lovely. Doubtless, as I have intimated, the strain, not of the harmony alone, but also of the fortitude, grace, and good- ness, unrelieved by the pressure, equally high, of treachery, rapacity, and lust, goes far towards explaining the languor in the study of Spenser. In poetry, as in life, it is dangerous to overtax endurance. The poet much before the close of most of his honeyed lays has exhausted the energy of average minds. The effect upon the relation of many of us to liimself personally is altogether different. The flood of unmixed essence of fancy which scares from attempts to swim it, offers a fascinating spectacle in the person of the master saihng easily over the expanse. By a remarkable fate the forlorn, noble figure of the writer attracts almost in proportion as the writings chill. We prize immeasurably references in them to himself ; to the silver-streaming Thames he loved, and the banks which his river hemmes. Painted all with variable flowers, And. all the meades adorned with dainty gemmes. Fit to decke maydens bowres ; " to merry London, my most kyndly nurse. That to me gave this life's first native course, D-2 36 THE POETS Though from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame ; ^^ to Ouse, which doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge, whom as with a croune He doth adorne, and is adorned of it With many a gentle Muse and many a learned wit ; ^^ to Ralegh's visit to him in the cooly shade Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore,** with its result, the manifestation to the world of The Faerie Queene — an epoch in hterature ; and to the friendship and death of Sidney : Most gentle spirite breathed from above, Out of the bosom of the Maker's bhs. In whom all bountie and all vertuous love Appeared in all their native propertis, And did enrich that noble breast of his With treasure passing all this worldes worth Worthie of heaven it selfe, which brought it forth.i^ Any rays thus shed upon his life and companionships are as welcome as they are delightful ; but they are rare ; and few trustworthy contemporary traditions and reminiscences exist to supplement them. His was not a temperament to gather about him a court of admirers who would have chronicled his words, and sung his praises. Even for an avowal of the vast poetical enterprise on which he had em- barked, his confidence had to be forced by an accomphshed stormer of hearts like ' the Shepheard of the Ocean ', who, Whether allured with my pipes delight. Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right. Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit, And found himselfe full greatly pleased at it.*^ EDMUND SPENSER 37 Heart and spirit he instinctively kept for his verse ; and for admittance to his privacy we must go thither. In that wide and flowery region he wandered without fear or shy restraint. Fancy there opened its gates to him freely and largely ; and he trod its precincts as a master. We view him in it as he would, we may be sure, have most desired to be seen — as he most really was. It is a pleasant sight : — consoling, also in the lurid hght of after miseries — bereave- ment, penury, hunger, despair — too probable in the general outhne, though coloured perhaps by posthumous pity and shame. At all events, the creator of The Faerie Queene, the Epithalamion, Colin Clout, cannot but have dreamt, in numberless waking hours, a host of happy visions. The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Rev. H. J. Todd, Archdeacon of Cleveland. E. Moxon, 1845. ' The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto xii, st. 23. - Ibid., Book IV, Canto xii, st. 1. » A View of the State of Ireland (Works), p, 532. * Amoretti, or Sonnets, No. 81. ^ Epithalamion, vv. 74-01, " Amoretti, or Sonnets, No. 74. ' An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, vv. 99-112. « Amoretti, or Sonnets, No. 69. » Ibid., No. 68. '" The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto xii, st. 71. " Prothalamion, vv. 11-15. i^ ibjd^ ^^ 127-31. " The Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto ii, st. 34. " Colin Clout 's Come Home Againe, vv. 58-9. 15 The Ruines of Time, vv. 281-7. >« Colin, &c., vv. 61-2 and 69-71. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1564—1616 Shakespeare, the poet of the Plays, and Shakespeare, the poet of the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece — how is it possible that the two should have shared one mind ! In the dramas he is open, clear, direct, reckless with method, natural. The wondrous mixture of high and low, the variety — cloud and sunshine — the abundance of words, not one too many, the touches transmuting into gold the lead of the stories, which, after the fashion of his period, he preferred improving to inventing, the single illuminating sentences, the adorable simplicity, thought as wide as it is deep ! Never was writer more impersonal, less, apparently, capable of egotism. It does not seem to have occurred to him to blot or polish. Nowhere are there serpentine writhings, and knot-tyings of wit. How, it might be thought, must the Euphuists have deplored the waste of his opportunities by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ! He is a grand moralist without affectation of austerity. Occasional coarsenesses are never in the grain. No playwright has ever framed finer or more honest models of family life. He enables us to picture to ourselves strugghng human nature ; common, not vulgar, and without the prosaic dulness of reality. He probes hearts, as no professed philosopher ever could. And the intelligibihty of it all ! Its transparent, absolute plainness to average minds — its infinite suggestiveness, its mysteries, to the metaphysician ! Contemporaries found the successive tragedies and comedies entirely of their own time. For each subsequent generation WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 39 they have been as unaffectedly modern. The secret has been neither mere nature, nor mere art. Mainly it has lain from age to age in a continuing collaboration between author and public. His public has been prompting him for more than three centuries, and he it. He and it have been breathing the same air, been impelled by the same emotions. As remarkable are the Songs. Elizabethan lyrics have a trick, happily not invariable in them, of ingenuity and artifice. Shakespeare's, unless, perhaps, in Love's Labour Lost, shook themselves free. They grow without an effort out of the action, spirit, and character. Up they start, wild spring flowers, wherever we set our feet. All show a delicious naivete, a bird-like hberty. Take as instances the Fairy's air in A Midsummer Night's Dream : I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green ; The cowslips tall her pensioners be ; In their gold coats spots you see, These be rubies, fairy favours. In those freckles live their savours ; I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear ; ^ the praise of Silvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona : - Who is Silvia ? What is she. That all our swains commend her ? Holy, fair, and wise is she. The heavens such grace did lend her, That she might admired be ; ^ Balthasar's song in Much Ado About Nothing : Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more ; Men were deceivers ever ; One foot in sea, and one on shore ; To one thing constant never ; ^ 40 THE POETS Tliat of Amiens in As You Like It : Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me, And tune his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat. Come hither, come hither, come hither ; Here shall we see No enemy ,But winter and rough weather ; * the boy's song, though the authorship is less certain, in Measure for Measure: Take, oh ! take those Ups away. That so sweetly were forsworn ; And those eyes, the break of day. Lights that do mislead the morn : But my kisses bring again, bring again ; Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain ; " the air-music in The Tempest : Come unto these yellow sands. And there take hands ; " Ariel's farewell to serfdom : Where the bee sucks, there suck I ; In a cowslip's bell I lie ; There I couch when owls do cry ; On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily : Merrily, merrily, shall I live now. Under the blossom that hangs on the bough ; "^ and the serenade in CymbeHne : Hark ! hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise. His steeds to water at these springs On chaliced flowers that lies ; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes j With everything that pretty bin : My lady sweet, arise ; Arise, arise ! ^ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 41 The grace and daintiness are wonderful. The variety would be yet more amazing were it not become to us a matter of course that each song should accord with its environings. In the whole range of English poetry notliing produces a fuller sense of the joy of life, the breadth of life, its com- pleteness, than the whole lovely company. My trouble is that, while I labour to praise, and am sensible that I cannot enough, I feel I am a trespasser on the Plays, and, after a sort, utterly beside the mark. The songs do not ask, and indeed scarcely suffer, eulogies on their poetical perfection. Those airy lyrics are not rightly to be viewed as aught in themselves. They just are effluences, native emanations from the movement of the dramas on which they bloom, with less substance than a blossom, with no more of tangi- bility than the blossom's fragrance. Strictly, as I am well aware, I ought not to have been picking and choosing at all, and certainly not with a view to intrinsic beauty. Catches like, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot, Adieu, goodman drivel, For a quart of ale is a dish for a king, 'Tis merry in hall when beards wag all, are as opportune where they occur as Ariel's carollings. The only plea I can offer in extenuation is, that, for the present purpose, my concern is -with Shakespeare the Poet, not with Shakespeare the Dramatist. While he was shedding, fast and carelessly, these double miracles, the Plays and their Songs, he must have been dreaming over his Lucrece, his Venus and Adonis, and his Sonnets. Throughout them if, especially in the Sonnets, he is recondite, introspective, demonstratively subtle, self- conscious, sensitively, sensuously, eager to call attention to his personal feelings and idiosyncrasies, he is scrupulous 42 THE POETS in diction. Though it seems grotesque to characterize Shakespeare as a styhst, there he is one, as much as Waller. The most delicate problems of life and society are attacked without the least fear of injurious interpretations. Each line has been studied, and is a study. Nothing has been thrown out to take its chance of sinking or swimming. Signs abound of a very different mode of regarding thought and learning in general from the manner of the Plays. In those the possession of knowledge, universal knowledge, is as it were taken for granted. No parade of it is made. As it is wanted it is present in whatever character might be expected to be equipped with it. As the dramatist acquired it, the store turned at once into dramatic flesh and blood. History, law, romance, were simply materials ' pour servir '. A professed scholar like Milton might in good f aitli have regarded him as, in the Plays, wholly, ' fancy's child ', and his conversance with the world of the past and its literature as intuition ratlier than research. The praise of the 'native wood-notes wild ', had it referred to the Poems, so-called, would have been curiously inept. These Milton probably either had never known, or in his Puritan severity had chosen to forget. Critical discernment such as his, if directed to them, could not have failed to see everywhere the work of a student, hard, anxious brain-work, brain- lace-work. Not to compare them specially with dramatic dialogue and narrative, note a contrast as entire between their essential spirit and that even of the dramatic lyrics. An impassable abyss divides the gushes of song in the woods of Attica, Arden, Britain, Illyria, Prospero's isle of magic, Bohemia — never studied, never extravagant, never out of keeping — from the unbuskined poet's ecstasies of passionate desire, passionate friendship, and passionate despair. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 43 The beauties of the Plays, surprising as they are, scarcely surprise, as, in their due course, they unfold themselves ; they seem inevitable. One would hke to be sure that their author was aware of the prodigies issuing from him ; that he felt he was conversing with spirits of the air. At all events in the Sonnets and Tales we are never in any doubt of his sense of copyright. He does not attempt to hide his pride in them, and in the pains they have cost him. He was entitled to be jiroud. If the poet's aim be to imagine every point of view from which a single idea can be contem- plated, to view it with all possible lights and shades upon it, to intoxicate himself with it, until for him it grows to be the sun round which the celestial system revolves, then Shake- speare can have told himself tha-t in his Poems he had succeeded. They evince a prodigality of effort and patience ; and he desired they should. In the Plays he was a disem- bodied voice ; and a voice speaking to whosoever chose to listen. Here he is his individual self, singing, discoursing, to an audience in any case very few, if fit. Though no maker of music like this could bear to be with- out something of a public, I do not suppose that he expected or cared to shout his melodies into the common ear. In his Venus and Adonis he indulged an artist's, something also of a psychologist's, wish to explore the utmost extravagance of license conceivable in a Being uniting intense animalism with supernatural independence of shame and of self- respect. The wealth of imagery was lavished for scholars steeped in the spirit of the Renaissance, not, though some- thing of humour may be suspected, for the popular admirers of the Merry Wives. The disappointed goddess's appeal to and against Death, with its tempest of furious figures and conceits, moves, and was meant to move, rather the intellect than the heart : 44 THE POETS * Hard favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, Hateful divorce of love,' — thus chides she Death, — * Grim -grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath. Who when he lived, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet ? Hadst thou but bid beware, then he had spoke, And, hearing him, thy power had lost his power. The Destinies will curse thee for this stroke ; They bid thee crop a weed, thou pluck' st a flower : Love's golden arrow at him should have fled. And not Death's ebon dart, to strike him dead.^ The Lucrece stirs finer and loftier feelings, yet springing from analogous sources. The innocent loveliness of Lucrece asleep is portrayed with exquisite art : Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet ; whose perfect white Show'd like an April daisy on the grass. With pearly sweat, resembling dew of night. Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheathed their light, And canopied in darkness sweetly lay, Till they might open to adorn the day.'" The self -disgust of the caitiff himself at his hateful triumph is touched with the hand of a master. Note the grand third line : For now against himself he sounds this doom, That through the length of times he stands disgraced ; Besides, his soul's fair temple is defaced.'' His agonized victim prays that there may be devised : extremes beyond extremity, To make him curse this cursed crimeful night.'^ On his behalf, with a refinement of vengefulness, she even, like Kehama, demands of Time a reprieve for him from premature death : WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 46 Let him have time to tear his curled hair, Let him have time against himself to rave. Let him have time of time's help to despair, Let him have time to hve a loathed slave. Let him have time a beggar's orts to crave, And time to see one that by alms doth live Disdain to him disdained scraps to give.^^ It might seem that the poet, unlike the diamatist, too constantly enlarges, appears never to know when to stop. But here it was not enough for him to strike his blow, to have carried the action a stage on. It is a study ujjon wliich he is engaged. His fancy has to explore the wide field of a guiltless woman's torments at enforced partnership in an act of guilty lust. He has to ransack, and exhibit, the horrible petty details, the girl's shuddering belief that the loutish groom who shyly takes her order to fetch her husband from the camp, must be conscious of her fall, as he looks upon her, and be blusliing to see her shame .^* The intensity of poetical introspection, the keenness of spiritual vivisection, reach their extreme point, however, in the Sonnets. Their subject, Southampton, Pembroke, or anybody else, and their precise object, as the chain of harmony sways to and fro, are immaterial to us. Probabty they soon became so, if individual substance they ever had, to their artificer. He compacted them out of dreams, in a trance of all active mental powers but imagination. Ordinary readers in the later generations. That wear this world out to the ending doom, on whom he prophetically counted — ' eyes not yet created ' — to immortalize his verse, will choose from a dozen to a score, more or fewer,^^ of the hundred and fifty-four to cherish. 46 THE POETS They will dwell upon isolated lovelinesses, upon visions of dainty melancholy ; When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, 1 sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, x4.nd with old woes new wail my dear time's waste. Then can I drown an eye unused to flow. For precious friends hid in death's dateless night. And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe. And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight : Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of forebemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, AH losses are restored and sorrows end ; ^'' upon the spell of one absorbing love ; a summary of a whole life's dear loves : Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts. Which I by lacking have supposed dead ; And there reigns love, and all love's loving parts. And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear rehgious love stol'n from mine eye, As interest of the dead, which now appear But things removed which hidden in thee lie ! Thou art the grave where buried love doth live. Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone. Who all their parts of me to thee did give ; That due of many now is thine alone : Their images I loved I view in thee. And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.'^ Where find a parallel for the Beloved's unchanging charm ? Not in a summer's day. Thou art more lovely and more temperate ; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date ; WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 47 Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd ; And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd ; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest ; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal hnes to time thou growest : So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.^'' He is the sun whom a terrestrial adorer cannot expect to sliine upon him without occasional clouds to intervene : Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy : Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, SteaUng unseen to west with his disgrace : Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendour on my brow ; But, out, alack ! he was but one hour mine. The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth ; Son^ of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.^^ He is the rose, which will die, as roses must, but be fragrant in the tomb : O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, By that sweet ornament which truth doth give ! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye As the perfumed tincture of the roses, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly When summer's breath their masked buds discloses : 48 THE POETS But, for their virtue only is their show, They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade ; Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so : Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made : And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, When that shall fade my verse distills your truth.^" To the poet himself the century and a half were no garden from which to cull a blossom here and there ; they made a single bouquet, to be enjoyed as a whole. Such it still is to his modern worsliippers, who, if put to the tragic necessity of choosing, I can well beheve, would, to save the Sonnets, sacrifice Lear, The Tempest, Othello. There the difference is between them and the common lover of poetry, hke myself. It is the same difficulty which arises in the endea- vour to form a true estimate of Sidney's analogous series. Here, as with that, it is simple justice to strive to see through the eyes of the author himself. By Shakespeare, as by Sidney, and with more inexorable consistency, the universe of fancy had been ransacked to crown his ideal of adoring friendship. There are conceits which excite a smile, and extravagant freaks of self-denial and forgiveness. Thus, it is rank treason to discover in the Beloved — the ever ' kind and true ' because ' eternally fair ' — specks on the ' sun's ' disk, hke apparent fickleness and cruelty ; merest peccadil- loes, though among them be desertion ; robbery of a mistress's love ; nay, positive aversion : Then hate me when thou wilt ! ^^ He had liimself anticipated a charge of monotony in his verse, so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change. '^- But if he is thought tedious, it is that the modern reader has not learnt, or does not care, to follow, step by step ; to apply the miscroscope to passion. Each Sonnet adds a fresh WILLIAlVr SHAKESPEARE 49 touch to the elaborate tracery. The workmanship, to be appreciated, must be regarded in the spirit in which it was executed. Shakespeare was compelhng his own heart to beat before him while he registered its every pulsation. The theme he had set himself was a fantasy of love, one-sided, feeding on itself, conjuring up all possible experiences of joy and suffering it could traverse. If one can be proved to be wanting, he has failed ; if none, he has triumphed. When a great artist has undertaken difficult work, and has done it superlatively well, it is officious to attempt to criticize, or even justify, the enterprise. To try to explain the selection of the particular subject is lawful. Strange as it seems for the creator of King Lear, Macbeth, the Tempest, Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, to have complained of his introduction into the career which led direct to them, without which thej'' might never have existed, it was disgust at the Stage which probably we have in a large measure to thank for the star- shower of the Sonnets. A heart such as his must have sorelj' ached before it gave way to a moan like this : Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there. And made myself a motley to the view, Gored'mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of aflfections new ; Moft true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely ! -"' before he could bring himself to chide bitterly with Fortune, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than pubhc means which pubUc manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand. And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand ; Pity me then and wish I were renew'd.^* VOL. I E 60 THE POETS In inditing his Sonnets, he was free at least from the slavery to public caprices, which he abhorred. He had to consult not tastes of the crowd, but those of his friend, or his own. As he wove his brain into these miracles of embroidery, doubtless he felt that he possessed his soul before he died. Paying no heed what became of a Hamlet and the like, he looked with assured hope to his Sonnets for immortality : So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.^' Yet do thy worst, old Time ; despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.^^ When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie, Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read ; And tongues to be your being shall rehearse. When all the breathers of this world are dead ; You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — Where breathe most breaths, even in the mouths of men." He deceived himself both in underrating the greatness of one part, the chief, of his life's business, and in overrating the capacity of posterity for adequate appreciation of the other. The Sonnets owe it to the Dramas that they have had a chance of manifesting their own particular radiance. If ' with that key ' he ' has unlocked his heart '.^^ it is that the Plays by thousands of lightning flashes had guided after-ages through the shades in which the casket was lying forgotten. At the same time it may be acknowledged that, if there be still room for fresh bewilderment in the endeavour to plumb and measure the height, depth, and breadth of the powers of an eternal, inscrutable paradox, there are always the Sonnets to make darkness visible by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 51 occupying the vacant space. Students of letters, to pretend to offer a precedent for the doubled enigma, must go back as far as to Dante. The Temple Shakespeare. M. Dent and Co. 1 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i, So. 2. ^ Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act iv, Sc. 1. ^ Much Ado About Nothing, Act ii, Sc. 3. ' As You Like It, Act ii, Sc. 5. ' Measure for Measure, Act iv, Sc. 1. « The Tempest, Act i, Sc. 2. ' Ibid., Act v, Sc. 2. ' Cymbeline, Act ii, Sc. 3. « Venus and Adonis, vv. 931-7 and 943-8. 1" The Rape of Lucrece, vv. 393-9. " Ibid., vv. 717-19. >2 Ibid., V. 970. » Ibid., vv. 981-7. » Ibid., v. 1344. 1^ Nos. 18, 29, 30, 31, 33, 54, 55, 60, 71, 72, 73, 76, 81, 86, 87, 89, 99, 104, 116. 1° No. 30. " No. 31. '' No. 18. '' No. 33. "-" No. 54. 21 No. 90 -'- No. 76. " No. 110. -* No. 111. =5 No. 18. 2« No. 19. " No. 31. " Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets, Part II, No. 1. E 2 BEN JONSON 1574—1637 L' Allegro owes amends to the memory of Ben Jonson for popularizing the legend that learning was his chief dis- tinction. Like inferior contemporaries who referred to Jonson's learning, Milton hmited the qualification to the drama.^ By that he intended panegyric rather than blame. Later ages have construed the criticism as general, and read into it a charge of pedantry. Far from disproving the view, Jonson himself, it must be admitted, seems in his plays to fit the cap on. Yet I do not know that, applicable as it may be to him, it is not equally appropriate to others. For the most part dramatists of the period were scholars, and not shy of displaying their classical attainments. To Jonson's lyrics, at all events, it is not much more relevant than to Fletcher's, certainly not more than to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, or the Rape of Lucrece. Consider them on their intrinsic merits ; and it may be argued that they have equals ; I think it would be hard to find their superiors. Simplicity is among their primary charms, as in the ideal woman : Give me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace ; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free ; Such sweet neglect more taketh me, Than all the adulteries of art ; They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.'^ The same quality rises to perfection in the Song to Celia : BEN JONSON 63 Drink to me, only with thine eyes. And I will pledge with mine ; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise, Doth ask a drink divine ; But might I of Jove's nectar sup, I would not change for thine. 1 sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honouring thee, As giving it a hope that there It could not wither'd be. But thou thereon didst only breathe. And sent'st it back to me ; Since when it grows, and smells, I swear. Not of itself, but thee.^ Nothing here is elaborate ; there is scarcely a show of ingenuity. The idea is the merest thistledown. The words might be set to an infant school for a spelling exercise. They have fallen each into its own natural, necessary place, as easily as the stones into the walls of Thebes at the bidding of Amphion's lute. So with the eulogy of Truth : Truth is the trial of itself, And needs no other touch ; And purer than the purest gold. Refine it ne'er so much. It is the life and light of love. The sun that ever shineth. And spirit of that special grace, That faith and love defineth. It is the warrant of the word. That yields a scent so sweet. As gives a power to faith to tread All falsehood under feet.' 54 THE POETS It runs as limpidly as a popula.r hymn ; only, with dejiths in it. The Epitaph on ' Ehzabeth ' would equally befit a village tombstone and a monument in Westminster Abbey. It seems to have dropped from the sky : Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die ; Which in hfe did harbour give To more virtue than doth hve.^ Doubtless art informed the fabric ; but the scaffolding is gone. It is seldom indeed that, as towards the conclusion of the otherwise spontaneous lament for the Child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel : Weep with me, aU ye that read This httle story ; And know, for whom a tear you shed Death's self is sorry, "^ he cares to parade his knowledge, astronomical or mytho- logical — ' three-filled Zodiacs ', and repentant ' Parcae '. Such display in his lyrics is exceptional. Even when he chooses to be gracefully, almost coldly, Hellenic, as in a Hymn to Diana, there is no affectation of classical tropes and phraseology : Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep. Seated in thy silver chair. State in wonted manner keep : Hesperus entreats thy hght, Goddess excellently bright. Lay thy bow of pearl apart. And thy crystal shining quiver ; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short soever ; Thou that mak'st a day of night, Goddess excellently bright.'' BEN JONSON 55 If I have not cited for the same virtue the epitaph on Lady Pembroke, the subject of all verse,* it is not that I question Jonson's authorship. That has been disputed on the ground, partly, of its appearance, with an added stanza, in manuscripts of Wilham Browne's poems ; partly, of Browne's reference in his elegy on Lady Pembroke's grandson. Lord Herbert, to verses by him mourning the young lord's grand-dame. Probably the copyist intentionally prefixed Jonson's six lines to Browne's ; and Browne's own allusion in his epitaph on Lord Herbert, still more probably, was to his undoubted elegy on the grandmother. To me the single famous stanza, terse and masterful, breathes all over of Jonson. But he is rich enough to dispense even with it, or with any other contro- verted attributions in Underwoods. I have dwelt first on the beauty of his simplicity, in answer to the popular fable of his pedantry. The feature which, more than his learning, and equally with the simple sweet- ness, impresses me in his verse, is the gift of thinking high thoughts while he sings. The melody flows on meanwhile ; the diction, which suited the lament for a dead child, remains as unaffected, though on a different plane, when he discourses profundities. The meaning is recondite, the language continues to be beautifully natural. View the Picture he dreams of a noble mind lodged in as fair a body : A mind so pure, so perfect fine, As 'tis not radiant, but divine ; And so disdaining any trier, 'Tis got when it can try the fire. WTiose notions when it will express In speech, it is with that excess Of grace, and music to the ear. As what it spoke it planted there. 66 THE POETS The voice so sweet, the words so fair, As some soft chime had stroked the air, And though the sound were parted thence. Still left an echo in the sense. But that a mind so rapt, so high. So swift, so pure, should yet apply Itself to us, and come so nigh Earth's grossness ; there 's the how and why. Hath she here, upon the ground, Some Paradise or palace found. In all the bounds of Beauty, fit For her t' inhabit ? There is it. Thrice happy house, that hast receipt For this so lofty form, so straight. So pohsh'd, perfect, round, and even. As it sUd moulded off from heaven. Smooth, soft, and sweet, in all a flood Where it may run to any good ; And where it stays, it there becomes A nest of odorous spice and gums. In action, winged as the wind ; In rest like spirits left behind. Upon a bank, or iield of flowers. Begotten by the wind and showers. ^ It is the same in the imaging of true love : A golden chain let down from heaven, Whose hnks are bright and even That falls hke sleep on lovers ; " in his promise of Heaven's blessing to the honest soldier : Go seek thy peace in war ; Who falls for love of God shall rise a star ; " and, lastly, in the two subhme elegies — paeans rather — one on the young Marchioness of Winchester : BEN JONSON 67 Go now, her happy parents, and be sad, If you not understand what child you had, If you dare grudge at heaven, and repent T' have paid again a blessing was but lent ; If you can envy your own daughter's bUss, And wish her state less happy than it is ; ^- tlie other, on the two friends, Sir Lucius Gary and Sir H, Morison : It is not growing hke a tree In bulk, doth make men better be ; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear ; A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night ; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see ; And in short measures, life may perfect be.^* Really Jonson's is too big a soul to be labelled under either simplicity or art. In one, as in the other, he is a master. He is equally enchanting, whether he sue to Celia in words of one syllable, with sense, sweet sense, corresponding, or tie knots with joyous ingenuity, and exquisite rhythm. Hear him, as in an ecstasy he compares the beauties of ,Charis to all conceivable perfection : Have you seen but a bright lily grow. Before rude hands have touch' d it ? Have you mark'd but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutch'd it ? Have you felt the wool of the bever ? Or swan's down ever ? Or have smelt o' the bud of the briar ? Or the nard in the fire ? Or have tasted the bag of the bee ? O so white ! O so soft ! so sweet is she ! ^^ 58 THE POETS Or as he rhapsodizes on the dead mistress's glove and The rosy hand that wear thee, Whiter than the kid that bare theeJ^ He can be at once extravagant and plausible, in the piteous appeal of Echo for a tribute to Narcissus : Droop herbs and flowers, Fall grief in showers. Our beauties are not ours ; ^^ and in the absurdly pretty conceit of the sand in an hour- glass being the remains of a lover, who in his mistress' flame, playing like a fly, Was turned to ashes by her eye." The variety is inexhaustible. He is at home in a fencing school, with a right noble moral : It is the law Of daring not to do a wrong ; 'tis true Valour to sUght it, being done to you.^^ Perhaps he is even too jovially inspired in a wins-cellar, Bacchus's temple, where the god makes Many a poet. Before his brain do know it." We feel him to be always certain of his effect, whatever the subject. Above all, how generous with praise, well worth having, was this man who has been accused of malevolence and mean jealousy ! Good words, not merely for the dead, whom it costs nothing to praise, but for living contemporaries, fellow workers, rivals ! And, among those, laudation not of manifest inferiors alone, a Nicholas Breton, a Thomas Wright, a May, a Rutter, but of a Chapman also, a Beaumont, a Fletcher, a William Browne. His admiration stops not with genius which he was liEN JONSON 59 confident he could match, probably exceed. He had the honesty of intellect, the greatness of soul, to recognize a superior. Never has Shakespeare — outshining, in spite of 'small Latin and less Greek', even ' Mario w's mighty line ' — been crowned with a worthier wreath than Jonson's to a Beloved Memory. The elegy is the sole authentic source of all we know, or need to know, of contemporary opinion on the portent. And he who does obeisance is the one man who could with any show of right have grudged it ! Soul of the age ! The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage ! My Shakespeare, rise ! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A httle further off, to make thee room : Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time ! And all the Muses still were in their prime. When, hke Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or, hke a Mercury, to charm. Nature herself was proud of his designs. And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines ! Yet must I not give nature all ; thy art. My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part ; For a good poet's made as well as born And such wert thou ! ^^ Rare Ben Jonson indeed ! Rough-tongued, hard- drinking, self-assertive ; lavish and out-at-elbows, not ashamed to beg, to petition for conversion of official marks into market pounds ; miscellaneous in his companionships, from Prince Charles at Whitehall to King James's victim, romantic Ralegh in the Tower : revered by holy Henry 60 THE POETS Vaughan and courtly Suckling alike ; a very Prince of Bohemia ; a despot in his Apollo Club room, where he promulgated his laws to a circle of vassals, often foes in disguise ; ^^ on the lyre, most of ah, a sovereign, and there, I scarcely fear to say, no man's inferior, unless his ' Dear Master's '. When his own and a couple of succeeding generations classed the two together, they did not go so far wrong that we cannot at least understand them. As I read I have felt throughout, in meditating how to rank him as poet, not as dramatist, that he must sit either nowhere, or among the Great. Am I wrong in seating him with them ? The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William GifiEord. New Edition. Rout- ledge and Co., 1860. I L' Allegro, vv. 131-2. ^ Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman, Act i, Sc. 1. » To CeUa, Song 9 (The Forest). « Truth (Underwoods, No. 26). * Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H. (Epigrams, No. 154). * Ejiitaph on Salathiel Pavy — A Child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel (Epigrams, No. 120). ' Cynthia's Reve, ; or. The Fountain of Self-Love, Act v, Sc. 3. " Ej)itaph on the Countess of Pembroke (Underwoods, No. 15). " The Picture of the Mind (Underwoods, Eupheme, No. 4). 1" Epode (The Forest, No. 11). II An Epitaph to a Friend, Master Colby, to persuade him to the Wars (Underwoods, No. 32). 1* Elegy on the Lady Jane Paulet, Marchioness of Winton (Under- woods, No. 100). " A Pindaric Ode to the immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison. Strophe (Underwoods, No. 87). 1* A Celebration of Charis. IV. Her Triumph. 15 Cynthia's Revels, Act iv, Sc. 1. " Ibid., Echo, Act i, Sc. 1. 1' The Hour-Glass (Underwoods, Miscell. Poems, No. 6). 1' To William, Earl of Newcastle, on his Fencing (Underwoods, No. 88). 1^ Dedication of the King's New Cellar to Bacchus (Underwoods, No. 66). 2" To the Memory of my beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us (Underwoods, No. 12). 21 Leges Convivales — Rules for the Tavern Academy, pp. 726-7. FRANCIS BEAUMONT, 1586-1616 AND JOHN FLETCHER, 1576-1625 Senior and the superior in quantity, probably in quality also, of dramatic work, John Fletcher might well have claimed to have his name placed first in the strange, famous partnership. The reversed order is in exact accordance with all we might have expected from the modest author of The Faithful Shepherdess. What we could have least anticipated is, perhaps, if he were to be a professional dramatist at all, that he should have fathered, whether singly, or jointly, many of the j^ieces attributed to the literary firm. He ought to have been read in books, not seen on the stage ; to have been poet, not playwright. As a dramatist, he was applauded by two or three generations. He might have been immortal as a poet with Herrick, possibly with Spenser and Milton. No heights, at any rate in lyrics, were beyond the author of the delightful farewell of the Satyr to his adored type of chastity : Thou most virtuous and most blessed, Eyes of stars, and golden-tressed Like Apollo ! tell me, sweetest, What new service now is metest For the Satyr ? Shall I stray In the middle air, and stay The sailing rack, or nimbly take Hold by the moon, and gently make Suit to the pale queen of night For a beam to give thee light ?.- 62 THE POETS Shall I dive into the sea, And bring thee coral, making way Through the rising waves that fall In snowy fleeces ? Dearest, shall I catch thee wanton fawns, or flies Whose woven wings the summer dyes Of many colours ? Get thee fruit Or steal from Heaven old Orpheus' lute ? Holy virgin, I will dance Round about these woods as quick As the breaking light, and prick Down the lawns, and down the vales Faster than the windmill-sails So I take my leave, and pray All the comforts of the day, Such as Phoebus' heat doth send On the earth, may still befriend Thee and this arbour ! ' of the exquisite appeals, to Death, or against Death, each incomparable till one reads the next : Lay a garland on my hearse Of the dismal yew ; Maidens, willow branches bear ; Say, I died true ; My love was false, but I was firm From my hour of birth. Upon my buried body lie Lightly, gentle earth ; '^ and Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan ; Sorrow calls no time that 's gone ; Violets plucked the sweetest rain Makes not fresh nor grow again.' For its length the Passionate Lord's ecstasy over ' only melancholy ' might vie with II Penseroso itself, which shows reminiscences of it : FRANCIS BEAUMONT— JOHN FLETCHER C3 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 : Oh, sweetest melancholy ! Welcome, folded arms, and fixed eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that 's fasten' d to the ground, A tongue chain' d up without a sound ! Fountain-heads, and pathless groves. Places which pale passion loves ! MoonUght walks, when all the fowls Are warmly housed, 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.^ The Faithful Shepherdess is one song. There are pauses of dialogue, full of tranquil poetry, of plot, or a semblance of plot, just for rest to the singer's throat. Then out melody bursts from heath, grove, or river. Enghsh poetry has nothing to match it; not its, in other ways, unparal- lelled superior, A Midsummer Night's Dream ; not Comus. From the Satyr's joyous amazement, in the first scene, at the sight of the fair vestal Clorin : Lowly do I bend my knee. In worship of thy deity,^ to his vigil in the wood, where his great master. Pan, Entertains a lovely guest. When he gives her many a rose. Sweeter than the breath that blows The leaves," 64 THE POETS thence, to his flitting with the wounded swain in his arms, Through still silence of the night, Guided by the glow-worm's light,'' with the final parting from tlie maiden he reverently loves, the poet has transfigured the ' rude man and beast '. It is a new being that would have surprised and charmed graceless Ovid no less than self -dedicated Clorin. Fletcher's fancy, like the god's ' flower plucked with holy hand ', has a kindly magic power. From it, in turn, the rough amorous god of field and forest rises etherealized — like his satellite — into the beneficent genius of fold and cot, that keep'st us chaste and free As the young spring,^ with priests as gracious, good, and tuneful. Wanton, heartless, heart-breaker, Adonis-persecuting Venus he re- moulds into a Fair sweet goddess, queen of loves, Soft and gentle as thy doves.^ The broom-man's humble wares become things of beauty to be purchased with kisses : For a little, little pleasure. Take all my whole treasure ; '" and the beggar's rags and homespuns realize Ariel's life of bliss : In the world look out and see Wliere 's so happy a prince as he ! " Even a dead landlord, revisiting his inn, bids the guests regale on his best, with no bill to follow, except for a decent funeral.^^ Whatever the theme, be it the awaking to a sense of the witchery of FRANCIS BEAUMONT— JOHN FLETCHER G5 Beauty clear and fair, Where the air Rather like a perfume dwells ; Wliere the violet and the rose Their blue veins in blush disclose, And come to honour nothing else. Where to live near, And planted there, Is to live, and still live new ; Where to gain a favour is More than light, perpetual bliss. Make me live by serving you ; ^^ be it a merry tlireat against teetotallers : he that will to bed go sober Falls with the leaf still in October ; " or the hard problem : Tell me, dearest, what is love ? ^^ the touch is always light and happy. Fletcher has the gift, as Shakespeare in his Songs, of spontaneity. Like Shakespeare, he is in them impersonal, though after a different fashion. Shakespeare's lyrics suggest character, whether of the singer, or of the scene they diversify. Fletcher's usually breathe neither of the particular play in which they occur, nor of the poet, but of his real time. His genius, when actually he was writing under James, is distinctly Elizabethan. His poetry partakes of the essence of that golden age, with its double front, on one side patriotism and enterprise, often heroic, often rapacious, and Renaissance romance on the other. Ralegh repre- sented both aspects ; Fletcher, in his lyrics, the second. As poet he is ever on the wing, and sings as. he flies. To us it is an abrupt plunge from the pure ether of his lyrics VOL. I F 66 THE POETS to his mere earth, either tragedy, or comedy. An early seventeenth-centmy audience felt no shock at the contrast, of which probably neither it nor the author was particularly sensible. The high poetical rank of Fletcher's songs is indisputable. Yet, unless in anthologies, they do not appear, until recent times, to have been printed apart from his and liis col- league's dramas. Beaumont, while still Mving, was intro- tluced to the pubHc as a poet. As a translator he is well entitled to praise. His juvenile version of Ovid's metamor- phosis of Prodromus, though selected unfortunately for modern taste, indicates an intuitive feeUng for the analogy between the Elizabethan and the Augustan spirit. It explains the bygone fondness for Dan Ovid as the prince of story-tellers. The original writing, unless we override tradition and internal evidence, and share between him and Fletcher, who indeed could afford the loss, the lyrics in the pieces in which he collaborated, is, but for an occa- sional line, such as Sorrow can make a verse without a muse,^^ characterized by sheer mediocrity. It is made up for the most part of cobwebs and spluttering fireworks, with two capital exceptions. But then, what exceptions ! How could our English Helicon do without Beaumont's reminiscences of Ben Jonson's fellowship ! What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtile flame, As if that everyone from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest FRANCIS BEAUMONT— JOHN FLETCHER 67 Of his dull life ; then when there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past ; wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk fooUshly Till that were cancelled ; and when that was gone, We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty ; though but downright fools, mere wise ! " How, above all, could it spare the reverie in Westminster Abbey ! Mortality, behold, and fear. What a change of flesh is here ! Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones ; Here they he, had realms and lands, Who now want strength to stir their hands ; Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust, They preach, ' In greatness is no trust ! ' Here 's an acre sown indeed With the richest, royal'st seed. That the earth did e'er suck in Since the first man died for sin ; Here the bones of birth have cried, ' Though gods they were, as men they died ; ' Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings. Here 's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate ! ^* It is one of the many strange transformation scenes in poetical history. Suddenly, as we weary over a painful elegy on Lady Rutland, or fret at the petty whimsicalities of an amour with a dead mistress in her grass -green mantle of the grave, a veil seems to have been withdrawn, and the true man to appear — a fit companion for John Fletcher ! F 2 68 THE POETS The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. C4eorge Darley. 2 vols. E. Moxon, 1840. 1 The Faithful Shepherdess, Act v, Sc. 5. 2 The Maid's Tragedy, Act ii, Sc. 1. ^ The Queen of Corinth, Act iii, Sc. 2. * The Nice Valour ; or. The Passionate Madman, Act iii, Sc. 3. 5 The Faithful Shepherdess, Act i, Sc. 1. « Ibid., Act iii, Sc. 1. ' Ibid., Act iv, Sc. 2. « Ibid., Act i, Sc. 2. » Ibid., Act ii, Sc. 1. The Loyal Subject, Act iii, Sc. 5. The Beggar's Bush, Act ii, Sc. 1. '^ The Lovers' Progress, Act iii, Sc. 5. The Elder Brother, Act iii, Sc. 5. The Bloody Brother, Act iv, Sc. 2. The Captain, Act iv, Sc. 2. 1* An Elegy on the Death of the Countess of Rutland. Mr. Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson, vol. ii, p. 710. ^* On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey, vol. ii, pp. 709-10. DR. JOHN DONNE 1573—1631 A STEA.NGE career, a strange nature ! Heir to a saving London mercliant. Comrade of Essex and Ralegh in the famous dare-devil raid upon Cadiz, and in the less fortunate Islands Voyage. Beloved of stately, charming Countesses, and other ladies many, with more of charm and less of stateliness. Ruffling at Courts foreign and English. Con- sorting at taverns with Ben Jonson and the players, as wild a wit as the wildest. A born rebel against convention, and its slave. According to Izaak Walton, by the time he was twenty, to Jonson, by twenty-five, in the front rank of poets, admirable alike for skill and for audacity. Baring his heart in its nakedness, which was ' le tout ', by voice and pen to earn his circle's applause. Never, during his singing season, condescending to print, which would have brought the public renown he despised. Scattering among love ditties insolently amorous, angelic hymns, not rarely un- angelically besmirched. Then — suddenly — priest, preacher, theologian, dignitary, moralist, faithful husband, — a text, cheek by jowl with meek, profound Hooker, courtly and saintly Herbert, decorous, dexterous, and diplomatic Wotton, for the seventeenth-century chastened Boswell ; his Muse sulky, because forbidden to be proterva, produc- tive of none but an occasional, perhaps apocryphal, psalm ; yet, it may be, hard tasked at times to scov/1 down a pro- testing sigh after the naughty praedecanal nights, when there were cakes and ale and aching brows, rioting, remorse, and rioting again ! ^ 70 THE POETS Were poets ranked by mass of intellect, few would take precedence of Donne. He had wit, strength of reason, fire, learning, doggedness. In his verse he shows them all. Some sixty songs, sonnets, and so-called elegies, besides the Satires, are a complete armoury of whatever can be said in flattery of women, and of most that can be imagined against them. The compHments he pays them are always double-edged : I walk to find a true love : and I see That ' tis not a mere woman, that is she, But must or more or less than woman be. Yet know I not which flower I wish ; For should my true-love less than woman be, She were scarce anything ; and then, should she Be more than woman, she would get above All thought of sex, and think to move My heart to study her, and not to love. Both these were monsters ; since there must reside Falsehood in woman, I could more abide She were by art than nature falsified.^ By preference he is frankly abusive : If thou be'st born to strange sights, Things invisible go see, Ride ten thousand days and nights Till Age snow white hairs on thee ; Thou, when thou return' st, wilt tell me : All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear No where Lives a woman true and fair. In his rage against a coquette who has induced Love to implant himself with all her barbed lures and deceits in his heart, he threatens the god and her that, after executing a misanthropic will by which he gives, among other generous bequests of nothings, DR. JOHN DONNE 71 My best civility, And Courtship to an University, he will, vindictively, even perish : I'll undo The world by dying, because love dies too. Then all your beauty will be no more worth Than gold in mines, when none doth di'aw it forth. And all your graces no more use shall have Than a sun-dial in a grave : Thou, Love, taught' st me by making me Love her who doth neglect both me and thee. To invent and practise this one way, to annihilate all three ! ^ Though rarely he chooses, he can be, if still self -regarding, gentle : Stay sweet, and do not rise ; The light that shines comes from thine eyes ; The day breaks not, it is my heart. Because that you and I must part. Stay, or else my joys will die. And perish in their infancy.^ Ingenuity is the rule ; and that is tra,nscendent. Try to unravel the web, for instance, of The Will, The Primrose, The Bracelet, Ben Jonson's favourite — with its alternate curses and blessings upon the thief of the jewel, according as, child of Hell or ' honest man ', he kept or restored it — and speculate how much Mrs. Donne, and other objects of the poems, understood of them. His fancy coils and un- coils, as if it were a serpent, progressing all the time. His point of honour is to say nothing as it had ever been said before ; to be brilliant, almost idolatrous ; everything which a lover can be, except tender and kind. In the Satires he is no longer a Sphinx propounding enigmas ; he is a sledge-hammer, red-hot, rejoicing to sear as it crushes. Hard, unsparing, he is as fine a preacher there as his master Persius, and as deliberately rugged. 72 THE POETS With a heat far exceeding the Roman's he denounces the moral cowardice of Christian gentlemen : Hast thou courageous fire to thaw the ice Of frozen North discoveries ; and thrice Colder than salamanders, Uke divine Children in th' oven, fires of Spain and the line, Whose countries limbecs to our bodies be. Canst thou for gain bear ? and must every he Which cries not, ' Goddess ! ' to thy mistress, di'aw, Or eat thy poisonous words ? Courage of straw ! O desperate coward, wilt thou seem bold, and To thy foes and his, who made thee to stand Sentinel in his world's garrison, thus yield, And for forbid wars leave th' appointed field ? Know thy foes ; the foul devil, he whom thou Strivest to please, for hate, not love, would allow Thee fain his whole realm to be quit ; and as The world's all parts wither away and pass. So the world's self, thy other loved foe, is In her decrepit wane, and thou, loving this. Dost love a wither' d and worn strumpet ; last. Flesh, itself 's death, and joys which flesh can taste, sj Thou lovest ; and thy fair goodly soul, which doth Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loathe,* As bravely he upholds the right, the duty, of manly, not litigious . Doubt : Doubt wisely ; in strange way, To stand inquiring right, is not to stray ; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep. Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go. And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so. Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight. Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.'' He seems deliberately to have cultivated harshness of phraseology. His rhythm, while yet having a harmony of DR. JOHN DONNE 73 its own, is as uncouth. Nevertheless I know of no more complete specimens of the best of Elizabethan poetic capa- bilities than could be selected from his verse. Take, for instance, The Dream, addressed to his young wife : Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream ; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked' st me wisely ; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued' st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make di'cams true and fables histories ; Enter these arms, for since thou thought' st it best Not to dream all my dream, let 's act the rest. As lightning, or a taper's hght. Thine eyes, and not thy noise, waked me ;, Yet I thought thee — For thou lov'st truth — an angel at first sight ; But when I saw thou saw'st my heart. And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art, Wlien thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when Excess of joy would waken me, and cam'st then, I must confess it could not choose but be Profane to think thee anything but thee. Coming and staying show'd thee thee. But rising makes me doubt that now Thou art not thou. That Love is weak where Fear 's as strong as he ; 'Tis not all spirit pure and brave If mixture it of Fear, Shame, Horrour have. Perchance as torches, which must ready be. Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me. Thou cam'st to kindle, go'st to come ; then I Will dream that hope again, but else would die." And the sudden flashes which continually light up dark places ! For instance : J 74 THE POETS Christ's gallant humbleness. Be thine own palace, or the world's thy gaol. He that believes himself doth never lie. Man to get Tow'rds Him that 's infinite, must first be great. Finer examples than any from Donne may be cited of poetic workmanship, art, craft, of thought, of inspiration, severally ; few finer of all in combination. In him the casuist and the poet were wrought into a single being. It is impossible to distinguish which is the groundwork, which the embroidery, which the master, which the servant. Thought is interlaced with thought. Ideas knot themselves together, as if they never could be disentangled. Then in an instant the pattern unfolds itself radiantly clear, only an instant later to present a fresh bewildering maze. All the time, if the thinking is intricate, the sentiment often has a romantic delicacy which Sj)enser could not have surpassed. The love poems have no monopoly of the sinuous subtlety. We find it equaUy in the pieces entitled ' Divine ' ; for instance, in the explanation of the Clirist-God's assump- tion of frail flesh : that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe. There too it appears in union with passion and a bitter humour ; as in the scoffing defiance of the King of Terrors ; Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ; For those, whom thou think' st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be, Much pleasure, then from thcc much more must flow. And soonest our best men with thee do go ; Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. DR. JOHN DONNE 76 Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, Kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well. And better than thy stroke ! why swell' st thou then '! One short sleep past, we wake eternally. And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.^ Yet more triumphantly book-lore, philosophy — of the prae-inductive order — bigness of brain, and passion — all his eminent gifts — united to produce the Letters, and the pieces comprised in the Anatomy of the World, and the Progress of the Soul. We can watch, as in the epistle to Lady Salisbury, an idea expanding, swelling into a solemn chant. A grander note still sounds in the Second Anniversary of the death of Ehzabeth Drur3\ There, in a sublime strain, Donne at once mocks and exalts Death : Think thee laid on thy death-bed, loose and slack. And think that but unbinding of a pack. To take one precious thing, thy soul, from thence. Thinlv thyself jjarcla'd with fever's violence ; Anger thine ague more, by calling it Thy physic ; chide the slackness of the fit. Think that thou hear'st thy knell, and think no more, But that, as bells call'd thee to church before, So this to the triumphant church calls thee. Think Satan's sergeants round about thee be. And think that but for legacies they thrust. Give one thy pride, to another give thy lust ; Give them those sins which they gave thee before, And trust th' immaculate blood to wash thy score. Think thy friends weeping round, and think that they Weep but because they go not yet thy way. Think that they close their eyes, and think in this. That they confess much in the world amiss, Who dare not trust a dead man's eyes with that Which they from God and angels cover not." If for all a release, death surely was immediate bliss for one already liaK ethereal in hfe, whose 76 THE POETS pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say, her body thought ; » one whom it is impossible fitly to praise or mourn : She, she is dead, she's dead ; when thou knowest this, Thou knowest how dry a cinder this world is ! '° Upwards mounts the strain, delineating an ideal maiden — as Donne imagined the girl he had never seen — caught up to Heaven at fifteen — to its climax : Since His will is that to posterity Thou should' st for hfe and death a pattern be, And that the world should notice have of this. The purpose and th' authority is His. Thou art the proclamation ; and I am The trumpet, at whose voice the people came." His age felt the majesty of the thought. It saw no pre- sumj)tuousness in the prediction : I will through the wave and foam, And shall in sad lone ways, a lively sprite. Make my dark heavy poem light, and light. For though through many straits and lands I roam, I launch at Paradise, and I sail towards home ! ^^ Contemporaries admired, for the novelty, experiments to test how much rhythm and rhymes will bear without break- ing. They objected so httle to unscrupulous coarseness, which did not confine itself to secular verse, that King James insisted upon the ordination of the author of the audacious Epithalamion on his daughter, and made liim Dean of St. Paul's, Quaint quips and turns of a high- flavoured conceit dehghted them, as they spiced their dishes with ambergris and scents. They regarded allusions to physiological and medical details as by no means inap- propriate to mysteries of Faith, Many modern critics and DR. JOHN DONNE 77 students have so steeped themselves in tlie most brilhant of Enghsh Hterary eras as to find nothing distasteful in its ugly accidents of social usage. The rest of us may have been a little spoilt by the magnificent cleanliness of one tran- scendent writer of the period. We are tempted to forget that Epithalamia and the hke did not shock Shakespeare's own admu'ers. But we have to do with facts ; and the fact is that the ordinary lover of poetry wants to be free to dip into a volume without having to allow for eccen- tricities of diction or sentiment in consideration of its date. It is nothing to him as he reads, or lets read, that the singer in his hot youth, at the time he sang, was a gay courtier, or preying upon the Spaniard. He does not care to pick Ms way through nmd on the chance of happening, like a barn-door fowl of superior discernment, upon a precious stone in the midden. A habit consequently has grown up of ceasing popularly to reckon Donne as more than a con- tributor to selections, while, without recognizing the source, we use many of his lines and phrases as elements of the English language. 1 have expressed my sorrow for the common neglect, and have endeavoured to trace the cause. The attempt and the result aggravate the regret, and for the poet as well as liis work. The more I consider the excellence of that and its blemishes, the harder it remains to compre- hend how the same fancy should have vented such grossness with such ethereal conceptions ; how an offensive classical allusion should have been allowed to jar and mar the transfiguration declared in noble language to be wrought at Ordination by the laying- on of hands ; how the same potent fancy should have employed itself, at one moment, on epistolary communications to noble Englishwomen full of lofty beauty and piety, and, at another, on letters from 78 THE POETS Sappho suggestive of all the reverse. It may readily be believed that the various obnoxious verses were given to the world without their author's consent ; that ' in his peni- tential years he wished his own eyes had witnessed their funerals 'P Still the problem is unsolved, how they could ever have been born of him. Still posterity, which might have pardoned obscurity, but insists that literature for its daily food shall be wholesomely pure, has to share the penalty with him for licence v/hich has lost it, in the mire, not a few heavenly anthems ! John Donne — Poems, ed. E. K. Chambers. 2 vols. Lawrence and Bullen, 1896. (Also, John Donne — Poems, complete, ed. A. B. Grosart. Fuller Worthies Library, 1872.) 1 The Primrose, At Montgomery Castle, vv. 8-20. - The Will, vv. 21-2 and 46-54. ■' Break of Day, vol. i, p. 22. * Satire III, vv. 21-42. 3 Ibid. 77-84. " The Dream (Songs and Sonnets). ' Holy Sonnets, x (Divine Poems). * An Anatomy of the World — The Second^ Anniversary, vv. 93-112. » Ibid., vv. 244-6. " Ibid., vv. 425-8. » Ibid., vv. 52.3-8. 1- The Progress of the Soul, vi, vv. 53-7. GEORGE HERBERT 1593—1633 The model, the exemplar, the prince, of sacred poets. Not equal to one of his immediate successors in mystic piety, to another in enthusiasm ; but knowing best what he wanted, and able to execute whatever he felt needed and ought to be accomphshed by his pen. Made to lead, not foUov/. Sidney's peer in rank, force of brain, warmth of heart, sense of national duty, courtly fascination, romance. Endowed with a fancy as vivid as Sir Philip's for singing in ladies' bowers of a mistress's curls, enchanted groves, and purhng streams refreshing a lover's loves. Diverted thence by a more powerful strain in his nature, chivalrous after another sort, which enlisted him as the sworn soldier of his Church. Had he remained a courtier, his own age and posterity would have lost The Temple in exchange for many dexterous songs, if only on ' a scarf or glove ', on ' fictions and false hair '. He must have sung, whatever the subject. His nature, the bent of the period, and of the society to which he had belonged, being what they were, he hymned a Heavenly, very much as otherwise he would have extolled an earthly, love. Unconsciously he spun his hnes : Catching the sense at two removes.^ The prevailing taste was to treat a topic for verse as the scientific chemist treats an object he is compelling to reveal all its capabilities. Herbert is not a whit beliind Sidney in the almost cruel skill and patience with which he dissects 80 THE POETS tlie subject of his adorcation. Read, in proof, The Reprisal, Easter Wings, The Sinner, Conscience, The Anagram, the last three lines of The Dawning, Affliction, Jesu, Love Unknown, Paradise, The Bag, Praise, Grief, The Source, The Odour, The Forerunners, The Rose. And these are but specimens ! They exhibit the extravagance, often the ' coarseness ', which he stigmatizes as deforming contemporary love- ditties. In them the adorable simplicity of Gospel truths, the pure awe of Christian mysteries, are grotesquely traves- tied. He seems to think it enough that imagery is eccentric for it to be beautiful. He attests the sincerity of service to Heaven by the racking of fancy. Even the passion with which doubtless he started has, long before the climax, spent all motive force in its passage round the sharp curves of wit. If they stood alone, and we were unacquainted with Herbert's holy life and character, we might have been tempted to think the author something perhaps of a self- deceiver, and certainly nothing of a poet. Happily the faults are fashion's rather than his. A true soul breathes beneath the excrescences of style, and, what mainly con- cerns us here, a true poet. Not all his artifices, fireworks of wit, themselves are to be condemned. In their season, and kept within due bounds, they add piquancy and point to a pregnant thought. I could not wish away the sxu-prise that the dead Christ should have found no warm heart to sojourn in : O blessed bodie ! Wliither art thou thrown ? No lodging for thee but a cold hard stone ? So many hearts on earth, and yet none Receive thee ? ^ A grand idea animates the enigma : Ah, my deare God ! though I am clean forgot, Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.^ GEORGE HERBERT 81 It is a touching appeal of dumb creation to Man to worship the Creator that he alone owns, on behalf of all, the voice and knowledge, being the appointed ' Secretary ' of God's praise.^ We feel the pathetic sweet reality in the unreality of a literal acceptance of the entreaty not to ' grieve the Holy Spirit ' : And art thou grieved, sweet and sacred Dove, '^ When I am sowre, And crosse thy love ? Grieved for me ? The God of strength and power Grieved for a worm ? * The conceit, again, that Man's Maker, Hke a fairy god- mother, after forming him, proceeded to pour from a glass upon his head all earthly gifts but ' rest ', in order that, if not goodness, weariness might toss him to his Father's breast,^ is of an ingenuity indistinguishable from, and as* winning as, simplicity. He has told how, when he began to sing of celestial joys, he feared he could never be at pains sufficient to deck the lustrous sense. He sought out quaint words, trim invention, curHng metaphors, blotting often that he had written, till he heard a whisper : There is in love a sweetnesse readle penn'd." Had he foreseen, and cared to gratify, the curiosity of posterity, by arranging his poems in order of date, he would have enabled us to judge how far they comply with the counsel. As it is, they manifestly differ in the degree of obscuration of a ' plain intention '. Though all are hable to occasional contortions of fancy, these frequently divert rather than offend. Thus, we recognize the seventeenth century, not its eccentricities, in the point of view of primaeval puiity, when, VOL. I o 82 THE POETS Before that sinne turn'd flesh to stone. And all our lump to leaven ; A fervent sigh might well have blown Our innocent earth to Heaven ; '' of Redemption, as an old-world story of ill-requited seignorial magnanimity ; ^ of Humility, as a chara