A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 10

"And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil!

Where all the storms of pa.s.sion mainly beat On flesh and blood: where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, who do it so esteem.

"He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars But only as on stately robberies; Where evermore the fortune that prevails Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars The fairest and the best fac'd enterprise.

Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails: Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.

"He sees the face of right t'appear as manifold As are the pa.s.sions of uncertain man; Who puts it in all colours, all attires, To serve his ends, and make his courses hold.

He sees, that let deceit work what it can, Plot and contrive base ways to high desires, That the all-guiding Providence doth yet All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit.

"Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder cracks Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow Of Power, that proudly sits on others' crimes; Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks.

The storms of sad confusion, that may grow Up in the present for the coming times Appal not him; that hath no side at all, But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.

"Although his heart (so near allied to Earth) Cannot but pity the perplexed state Of troublous and distress'd Mortality, That thus make way unto the ugly birth Of their own sorrows, and do still beget Affliction upon imbecility: Yet seeing thus the course of things must run, He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done.

"And whilst distraught ambition compa.s.ses, And is encompa.s.s'd; whilst as craft deceives, And is deceiv'd: whilst man doth ransack man And builds on blood, and rises by distress; And th' inheritance of desolation leaves To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon, As from the sh.o.r.e of peace, with unwet eye, And bears no venture in impiety."

In sharp contrast with this the pa.s.sage from _Hymen's Triumph_,

"Ah, I remember well, and how can I,"

shows the sweetness without namby-pambyness which Daniel had at constant command. Something of the same contrast may be found between the whole of _Hymen's Triumph_ and the _Queen's Arcadia_ on the one side, and _Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_ on the other. All are written in mixed blank and rhymed verse, much interlaced and "enjambed." The best of the historical poems is, by common consent, _Rosamond_, which is instinct with a most remarkable pathos, nor are fine pa.s.sages by any means to seek in the greater length and less poetical subject of _The Civil Wars of York and Lancaster_. The fault of this is that the too conscientious historian is constantly versifying what must be called mere expletive matter. This must always make any one who speaks with critical impartiality admit that much of Daniel is hard reading; but the soft places (to use the adjective in no ill sense) are frequent enough, and when the reader comes to them he must have little appreciation of poetry if he does not rejoice in the foliage and the streams of the poetical oasis which has rewarded him after his pilgrimage across a rather arid wilderness.

Michael Drayton was much better fitted for the arduous, and perhaps not wholly legitimate, business of historical poetry than Daniel. If his genius was somewhat less fine, it was infinitely better thewed and sinewed. His ability, indeed, to force any subject which he chose to treat into poetry is amazing, and can hardly be paralleled elsewhere except in a poet who was born but just before Drayton's death, John Dryden. He was pretty certainly a gentleman by birth, though not of any great possessions, and is said to have been born at Hartshill, in Warwickshire, in the year 1563. He is also said, but not known, to have been a member of the University of Oxford, and appears to have been fairly provided with patrons, in the family of some one of whom he served as page, though he never received any great or permanent preferment.[29] On the other hand, he was not a successful dramatist (the only literary employment of the time that brought in much money), and friend as he was of nearly all the men of letters of the time, it is expressly stated in one of the few personal notices we have of him, that he could not "swagger in a tavern or domineer in a hothouse" [house of ill-fame]--that is to say, that the hail-fellow well-met Bohemianism of the time, which had led Marlowe and many of his group to evil ends, and which was continued in a less outrageous form under the patronage of Ben Jonson till far into the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have lived somehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in _The Citizen of the World_, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance of the best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeed alone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent among contemporaries eminent for it.

[29] Drayton has been thoroughly treated by Professor Oliver Elton in _Michael Drayton_ (London, 1905), enlarged from a monograph for the Spenser Society.

Drayton's long life was as industrious as it was long. He began in 1591 with a volume of sacred verse, the _Harmony of the Church_, which, for some reason not merely undiscovered but unguessed, displeased the censors, and was never reprinted with his other works until recently. Two years later appeared _Idea, The Shepherd's Garland_--a collection of eclogues not to be confounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the same real or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of these Drayton called himself "Rowland," or "Roland," a fact on which some rather rickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him in Spenser. His next work was _Mortimeriados_, afterwards refashioned and completed under the t.i.tle of _The Barons' Wars_, and this was followed in 1597 by one of his best works, _England's Heroical Epistles_. _The Owl_, some _Legends_, and other poems succeeded; and in 1605 he began to collect his Works, which were frequently reprinted. The mighty poem of the _Polyolbion_ was the fruit of his later years, and, in strictness, belongs to the period of a later chapter; but Drayton's muse is eminently one and indivisible, and, notwithstanding the fruits of pretty continual study which his verses show, they belong, in the order of thought, to the middle and later Elizabethan period rather than to the Jacobean.

Few poets of anything like Drayton's volume (of which some idea may be formed by saying that his works, in the not quite complete form in which they appear in Chalmers, fill five hundred of the bulky pages of that work, each page frequently containing a hundred and twenty-eight lines) show such uniform mixture of imagination and vigour. In the very highest and rarest graces of poetry he is, indeed, by common consent wanting, unless one of these graces in the uncommon kind of the war-song be allowed, as perhaps it may be, to the famous and inimitable though often imitated _Ballad of Agincourt_, "To the brave Cambro-Britons and their Harp," not to be confounded with the narrative "Battle of Agincourt," which is of a less rare merit. The Agincourt ballad,

"Fair stood the wind for France,"

is quite at the head of its own cla.s.s of verse in England--Campbell's two masterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "Six Hundred," falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short of it. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and the skill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogether beyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see _ante_) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and such elaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his great qualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous _Polyolbion_, written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any in English--the Alexandrine--crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obliging the author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superadded ornament, in elaborately patched-on pa.s.sages, than in the actual and natural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another than the mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative pa.s.sage:--

"The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise, (As they who only sought ambitiously to raise The blood of G.o.d-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear: And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air (Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make) Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take, That any petty hill upon the English side, Should dare, not (with a crouch) to veil unto their pride.

When Wrekin, as a hill his proper worth that knew, And understood from whence their insolency grew, For all that they appear'd so terrible in sight, Yet would not once forego a jot that was his right, And when they star'd on him, to them the like he gave, And answer'd glance for glance, and brave for brave: That, when some other hills which English dwellers were, The l.u.s.ty Wrekin saw himself so well to bear Against the Cambrian part, respectless of their power; His eminent disgrace expecting every hour Those flatterers that before (with many cheerful look) Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook, And m.u.f.fled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black, Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack: That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear (Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear; He, having none but them, they having none but he Which to their mutual joy might either's object be) Within their secret breast conceived sundry fears, And as they mix'd their streams, for him so mix'd their tears.

Whom, in their coming down, when plainly he discerns, For them his n.o.bler heart in his strong bosom yearns: But, constantly resolv'd, that dearer if they were The Britons should not yet all from the English bear; 'Therefore,' quoth he, 'brave flood, tho' forth by Cambria brought, Yet as fair England's friend, or mine thou would'st be thought (O Severn) let thine ear my just defence partake.'"

Happy phrases abound, and, moreover, every now and then there are set pieces, as they may be called, of fanciful description which are full of beauty; for Drayton (a not very usual thing in a man of such unflagging industry, and even excellence of work) was full of fancy. The fairy poem of _Nymphidia_ is one of the most graceful trifles in the language, possessing a dancing movement and a felicitous choice of imagery and language which triumphantly avoid the trivial on the one hand, and the obviously burlesque on the other. The singular satirical or quasi-satirical poems of _The Mooncalf_, _The Owl_, and _The Man in the Moon_, show a faculty of comic treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics called _Odes_ (of which the _Ballad of Agincourt_ is sometimes cla.s.sed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge _Polyolbion_, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist of three divisions--_The Barons' Wars_ in eight-lined stanzas, the _Heroic Epistles_ (suggested, of course, by Ovid, though anything but Ovidian) in heroic couplets, _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ in the same stanza as _The Barons' Wars_, and _Four Legends_ in stanzas of various form and range. That this ma.s.s of work should possess, or should, indeed, admit of the charms of poetry which distinguish _The Faerie Queene_ would be impossible, even if Drayton had been Spenser, which he was far from being.

But to speak of his "dull creeping narrative," to accuse him of the "coa.r.s.est vulgarities," of being "flat and prosaic," and so on, as was done by eighteenth-century critics, is absolutely uncritical, unless it be very much limited. _The Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, the author being too careful to give a minute history of a not particularly interesting subject, and neglecting to take the only possible means of making it interesting by bringing out strongly the characters of heroes and heroines, and so infusing a dramatic interest. But this absence of character is a constant drawback to the historical poems of the time. And even here we find many pa.s.sages where the drawback of the stanza for narrative is most skilfully avoided, and where the vigour of the single lines and phrases is unquestionable on any sound estimate.

Still the stanza, though Drayton himself defends it (it should be mentioned that his prose prefaces are excellent, and const.i.tute another link between him and Dryden), is something of a clog; and the same thing is felt in _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ and the _Legends_, where, however, it is again not difficult to pick out beauties. The _Heroical Epistles_ can be praised with less allowance. Their shorter compa.s.s, their more manageable metre (for Drayton was a considerable master of the earlier form of couplet), and the fact that a personal interest is infused in each, give them a great advantage; and, as always, pa.s.sages of great merit are not infrequent.

Finally, Drayton must have the praise (surely not quite irrelevant) of a most ardent and lofty spirit of patriotism. Never was there a better Englishman, and as his love of his country spirited him up to the brilliant effort of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, so it sustained him through the "strange herculean task" of the _Polyolbion_, and often put light and life into the otherwise lifeless ma.s.s of the historic poems. Yet I have myself no doubt that these historic poems were a mistake, and that their composition, though prompted by a most creditable motive, the burning attachment to England which won the fight with Spain, and laid the foundation of the English empire, was not altogether, perhaps was not by any means, according to knowledge.

The almost invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idle controversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in the case of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made in his own _Virgidemiarum_--

"Follow me who list, And be the _second_ English satirist."

It has been pleaded in Hall's favour that although the date of publication of his _Satires_ is known, the date of their composition is not known. It is not even necessary to resort to this kind of special pleading; for nothing can be more evident than that the bravado is not very serious. On the literal supposition, however, and if we are to suppose that publication immediately followed composition, Hall was antic.i.p.ated by more than one or two predecessors, in the production of work not only specifically satirical but actually called satire, and by two at least in the adoption of the heroic couplet form which has ever since been consecrated to the subject.

Satirical poetry, of a kind, is of course nearly if not quite as old as the language, and in the hands of Skelton it had a.s.sumed various forms. But the satire proper--the following of the great Roman examples of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius in general lashing of vice and folly--can hardly trace itself further back in England than George Gascoigne's _Steel Gla.s.s_, which preceded Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ by twenty years, and is interesting not only for itself but as being ushered in by the earliest known verses of Walter Raleigh. It is written in blank verse, and is a rather rambling commentary on the text _vanitas vanitatum_, but it expressly calls itself a satire and answers sufficiently well to the description. More immediate and nearer examples were to be found in the Satires of Donne and Lodge. The first named were indeed, like the other poetical works of their marvellously gifted writer, not published till many years after; but universal tradition ascribes the whole of Donne's profane poems to his early youth, and one doc.u.ment exists which distinctly dates "John Donne, his Satires," as early as 1593. We shall therefore deal with them, as with the other closely connected work of their author, here and in this chapter.

But there has to be mentioned first the feebler but chronologically more certain work of Thomas Lodge, _A Fig for Momus_, which fulfils both the requirements of known date and of composition in couplets. It appeared in 1595, two years before Hall, and is of the latest and weakest of Lodge's verse work. It was written or at least produced when he was just abandoning his literary and adventurous career and settling down as a quiet physician with no more wild oats to sow, except, perhaps, some partic.i.p.ation in popish conspiracy. The style did not lend itself to the display of any of Lodge's strongest gifts--romantic fancy, tenderness and sweetness of feeling, or elaborate embroidery of precious language. He follows Horace pretty closely and with no particular vigour. Nor does the book appear to have attracted much attention, so that it is just possible that Hall may not have heard of it. If, however, he had not, it is certainly a curious coincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on the couplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried.

For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively brief s.p.a.ce of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturally accompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in so many ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly be any more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which these writers, especially Donne and Marston, took to give individuality and "bite" to their work was as faulty as it now seems to us peculiar.

Ben Jonson, the least gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said of John Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," and I own that without going through the long catalogue of singularly contradictory criticisms which have been pa.s.sed on Donne, I feel disposed to fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium.

Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but that does not matter. It is sufficient for me that in one special point of the poetic charm--the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by a flood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capable imagination--Donne is surpa.s.sed by no poet of any language, and equalled by few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highest poetry with the lowest doggerel, the n.o.blest thought with the most trivial crotchet--all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it only chequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts and graces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets, although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlier than 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappeared wholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence of no poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towards his own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, except that of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as

"A king who ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit,"

expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headed by Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in the same monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet"

(that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifying which Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of the nation."

His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, in the earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at both universities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, a law-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the Roman Church, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced some religious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean of St. Paul's, and died in 1631.

It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition of most, and that all but certain doc.u.mentary evidence points to the composition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unless the date of the Harleian MS. is a forgery, some of his satires were written in or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling pa.s.sion, without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would also incline us to a.s.sign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, and many of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and more reflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatory character of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. All alike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality--the fiery imagination shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy thoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has a peculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture of voluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought from the marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of French Renaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English.

The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of the discovery of

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone"

of his own long interred skeleton: the wish--

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who died before the G.o.d of love was born,"

and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpected places, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. In some of his poems, as the _Anatomy of the World_, occasioned by the death of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (only touches here) of the pa.s.sion which had distinguished the author earlier (for the _Anatomy_ is not an early work), and with religious and philosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam--shot through, however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry.

Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. And the three following pieces, the "Dream," a fragment of satire, and an extract from the _Anatomy_, may or may not, according to taste, supply it:--

"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 wak'dst me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it: Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams 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 light Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd 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, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake 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 fears are strong as he; 'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave, If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have.

Perchance as torches which must ready be Men light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me.

Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then I Will dream that hope again, or else would die."

"O age of rusty iron! some better wit Call it some worse name, if ought equal it.

Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: now Injustice is sold dearer far; allow All claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anon The money, which you sweat and swear for's gone Into other hands; so controverted lands 'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands.

If law be in the judge's heart, and he Have no heart to resist letter or fee, Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts below Flows from the first main head, and these can throw Thee, if they suck thee in, to misery, To fetters, halters. But if th' injury Steel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'st Against the stream upwards when thou art most Heavy and most faint; and in these labours they 'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy way Become great seas, o'er which when thou shalt be Forc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt see That all thy gold was drowned in them before."

"She, whose fair body no such prison was But that a soul might well be pleased to pa.s.s An age in her; she, whose rich beauty lent Mintage to other beauties, for they went But for so much as they were like to her; She, in whose body (if we dare prefer This low world to so high a mark as she), The western treasure, eastern spicery, Europe and Afric, and the unknown rest Were easily found, or what in them was best; And when we've made this large discovery Of all, in her some one part then will be Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is Enough to make twenty such worlds as this; She, whom had they known, who did first betroth The tutelar angels and a.s.signed one both To nations, cities, and to companies, To functions, offices, and dignities, And to each several man, to him and him, They would have giv'n her one for every limb; She, of whose soul if we may say 'twas gold, Her body was th' electrum and did hold Many degrees of that; we understood Her by her sight; _her pure and eloquent blood_ _Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought_ _That one might almost say, her body thought_; She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is gone And chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl upon Our prison's prison earth, nor think us well Longer than whilst we bear our brittle sh.e.l.l."

But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a full anthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of English literature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry,"

though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedly glaring faults.