A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 20

It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a p.r.i.c.kly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, gra.s.sy plots, set round about with flowers.

Here, you might, through the water, see the land Appear, strewed o'er with white or yellow sand.

Yon, deeper was it; and the wind, by whiffs, Would make it rise, and wash the little cliffs; On which, oft pluming, sate, unfrighted then The gagling wild goose, and the snow-white swan, With all those flocks of fowl, which, to this day Upon those quiet waters breed and play."

When to this gift of description is added a frequent inspiration of pure fancy, it is scarcely surprising that--

"Such a strain as might befit Some brave Tuscan poet's wit,"

to borrow a couplet of his own, often adorns Wither's verse.

Two other poets of considerable interest and merit belong to this period, who are rather Scotch than English, but who have usually been included in histories of English literature--Drummond of Hawthornden, and Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Both, but especially Drummond, exhibit equally with their English contemporaries the influences which produced the Elizabethan Jacobean poetry; and though I am not myself disposed to go quite so far, the sonnets of Drummond have sometimes been ranked before all others of the time except Shakespere's.

William Drummond was probably born at the beautiful seat whence he derived his designation, on 13th December 1585. His father was Sir John Drummond, and he was educated in Edinburgh and in France, betaking himself, like almost all young Scotchmen of family, to the study of the law. He came back to Scotland from France in 1610, and resided there for the greater part of his life, though he left it on at least two occasions for long periods, once travelling on the continent for eight years to recover from the grief of losing a lady to whom he was betrothed, and once retiring to avoid the inconveniences of the Civil War. Though a Royalist, Drummond submitted to be requisitioned against the Crown, but as an atonement he is said to have died of grief at Charles I.'s execution in 1649. The most famous incidents of his life are the visit that Ben Jonson paid to him, and the much discussed notes of that visit which Drummond left in ma.n.u.script. It would appear, on the whole, that Drummond was an example of a well-known type of cultivated dilettante, rather effeminate, equally unable to appreciate Jonson's boisterous ways and to show open offence at them, and in the same way equally disinclined to take the popular side and to endure risk and loss in defending his principles. He shows better in his verse. His sonnets are of the true Elizabethan mould, exhibiting the Petrarchian grace and romance, informed with a fire and aspiring towards a romantic ideal beyond the Italian. Like the older writers of the sonnet collections generally, Drummond intersperses his quatorzains with madrigals, lyrical pieces of various lengths, and even with what he calls "songs,"--that is to say, long poems in the heroic couplet. He was also a skilled writer of elegies, and two of his on Gustavus Adolphus and on Prince Henry have much merit.

Besides the madrigals included in his sonnets he has left another collection ent.i.tled "Madrigals and Epigrams," including pieces both sentimental and satirical. As might be expected the former are much better than the latter, which have the coa.r.s.eness and the lack of point noticeable in most of the similar work of this time from Jonson to Herrick. We have also of his a sacred collection (again very much in accordance with the practice of his models of the preceding generation), ent.i.tled _Flowers of Sion_, and consisting, like the sonnets, of poems of various metres. One of these is noticeable as suggesting the metre of Milton's "Nativity," but with an alteration of line number and rhyme order which spoils it. Yet a fourth collection of miscellanies differs not much in const.i.tution from the others, and Drummond's poetical work is completed by some local pieces, such as _Forth Feasting_, some hymns and divine poems, and an attempt in Macaronic called _Polemo-Middinia_, which is perhaps not his. He was also a prose writer, and a tract, ent.i.tled _The Cypress Grove_, has been not unjustly ranked as a kind of antic.i.p.ation of Sir Thomas Browne, both in style and substance. Of his verse a sonnet and a madrigal may suffice, the first of which can be compared with the Sleep sonnet given earlier:--

"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings, Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, Sole comforter of minds which are oppressed; Lo, by thy charming rod, all breathing things Lie slumb'ring, with forgetfulness possess'd, And yet o'er me to spread thy drowsy wings Thou spar'st, alas! who cannot be thy guest.

Since I am thine, O come, but with that face To inward light, which thou art wont to show, With feigned solace ease a true felt woe; Or if, deaf G.o.d, thou do deny that grace, Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath: I long to kiss the image of my death."

"To the delightful green Of you, fair radiant een, Let each black yield, beneath the starry arch.

Eyes, burnish'd Heavens of love, Sinople[58] lamps of Jove, Save all those hearts which with your flames you parch Two burning suns you prove; All other eyes, compared with you, dear lights Are h.e.l.ls, or if not h.e.l.ls, yet dumpish nights.

The heavens (if we their gla.s.s The sea believe) are green, not perfect blue; They all make fair, whatever fair yet was, And they are fair because they look like you."

[58] In heraldry (but not English heraldry) = "green."

Sir William Alexander, a friend and countryman of Drummond (who bewailed him in more than one mournful rhyme of great beauty), was born in 1580 of a family which, though it had for some generations borne the quasi-surname Alexander, is said to have been a branch of the Clan Macdonald. Alexander early took to a court life, was much concerned in the proposed planting of Nova Scotia, now chiefly remembered from its connection with the Order of Baronets, was Secretary of State for Scotland, and was raised to the peerage. He died in 1640. Professor Ma.s.son has called him "the second-rate Scottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism." He might as well be called "the faithful servant of monarchy in its struggle with the encroachments of Republicanism," and one description would be as much question-begging as the other. But we are here concerned only with his literary work, which was considerable in bulk and quality. It consists chiefly of a collection of sonnets (varied as usual with madrigals, etc.), ent.i.tled _Aurora_; of a long poem on _Doomsday_ in an eight-lined stanza; of a _Paraenesis_ to Prince Henry; and of four "monarchic tragedies" on _Darius_, _Croesus_, _Alexander_, and _Caesar_, equipped with choruses and other appliances of the literary rather than the theatrical tragedy. It is perhaps in these choruses that Alexander appears at his best; for his special forte was grave and stately declamation, as the second of the following extracts will prove. The first is a sonnet from _Aurora_:--

"Let some bewitched with a deceitful show, Love earthly things unworthily esteem'd, And losing that which cannot be redeemed Pay back with pain according as they owe: But I disdain to cast my eyes so low, That for my thoughts o'er base a subject seem'd, Which still the vulgar course too beaten deem'd; And loftier things delighted for to know.

Though presently this plague me but with pain, And vex the world with wondering at my woes: Yet having gained that long desired repose My mirth may more miraculous remain.

That for the which long languishing I pine, It is a show, but yet a show divine."

"Those who command above, High presidents of Heaven, By whom all things do move, As they have order given, What worldling can arise Against them to repine?

Whilst castled in the skies With providence divine; They force this peopled round, Their judgments to confess, And in their wrath confound Proud mortals who transgress The bounds to them a.s.signed By Nature in their mind.

"Base brood of th' Earth, vain man, Why brag'st thou of thy might?

The Heavens thy courses scan, Thou walk'st still in their sight; Ere thou wast born, thy deeds Their registers dilate, And think that none exceeds The bounds ordain'd by fate; What heavens would have thee to, Though they thy ways abhor, That thou of force must do, And thou canst do no more: This reason would fulfil, Their work should serve their will.

"Are we not heirs of death, In whom there is no trust?

Who, toss'd with restless breath, Are but a drachm of dust; Yet fools whenas we err, And heavens do wrath contract, If they a s.p.a.ce defer Just vengeance to exact, Pride in our bosom creeps, And misinforms us thus That love in pleasure sleeps Or takes no care of us: 'The eye of Heaven beholds What every heart enfolds.'"

Not a few of his other sonnets are also worth reading, and the unpromising subject of _Doomsday_ (which connects itself in style partly with Spenser, but perhaps still more with _The Mirror for Magistrates_), does not prevent it from containing fine pa.s.sages. Alexander had indeed more power of sustained versification than his friend Drummond, though he hardly touches the latter in point of the poetical merit of short isolated pa.s.sages and poems. Both bear perhaps a little too distinctly the complexion of "_Gentlemen_ of the Press"--men who are composing poems because it is the fashion, and because their education, leisure, and elegant tastes lead them to prefer that form of occupation. But perhaps what is most interesting about them is the way in which they reproduce on a smaller scale the phenomenon presented by the Scotch poetical school of the fifteenth century. That school, as is well known, was a direct offshoot from, or following of the school of Chaucer, though in Dunbar at least it succeeded in producing work almost, if not quite, original in form. In the same way, Drummond and Alexander, while able to the full to experience directly the foreign, and especially Italian influences which had been so strong on the Elizabethans, were still in the main followers of the Elizabethans themselves, and formed, as it were, a Scottish moon to the English sun of poetry. There is little or nothing that is distinctively national about them, though in their following of the English model they show talent at least equal to all but the best of the school they followed. But this fact, joined to those above noted, helps, no doubt, to give an air of want of spontaneity to their verse--an air as of the literary exercise.

There are other writers who might indifferently come in this chapter or in that on Caroline poetry, for the reign of James was as much overlapped in this respect by his son's as by Elizabeth's, and there are others who need but slight notice, besides yet others--a great mult.i.tude--who can receive no notice at all. The doggerel of Taylor, the water-poet (not a bad prose writer), received both patronage and attention, which seem to have annoyed his betters, and he has been resuscitated even in our own times. Francis Beaumont, the coadjutor of Fletcher, has left independent poetical work which, on the whole, confirms the general theory that the chief execution of the joint plays must have been his partner's, but which (as in the _Letter to Ben Jonson_ and the fine stoicism of _The Honest Man's Fortune_) contains some very good things. His brother, Sir John Beaumont, who died not so young as Francis, but at the comparatively early age of forty-four, was the author of a historical poem on _Bosworth Field_, as well as of minor pieces of higher merit, including some remarkable critical observations on English verse. Two famous poems, which everyone knows by heart, the "You Meaner Beauties of the Night" of Sir Henry Wotton and the "Tell Me no more how fair She is" of Bishop Henry King, are merely perfect examples of a style of verse which was largely if not often quite so perfectly practised by lesser or less known men, as well as by greater ones.[59]

[59] The most interesting collection and selection of verse of this cla.s.s and time is undoubtedly Dr. Hannah's well-known and charming but rather oddly ent.i.tled _Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, and other Courtly Poets_ in the Aldine Series. I say oddly ent.i.tled, because though Raleigh and Wotton were certainly courtiers, it would be hard to make the name good of some of the minor contributors.

There is, moreover, a cla.s.s of verse which has been referred to incidentally before, and which may very likely be referred to incidentally again, but which is too abundant, too characteristic, and too charming not to merit a place, if no very large one, to itself. I refer to the delightful songs which are scattered all over the plays of the period, from Greene to Shirley. As far as Shakespere is concerned, these songs are well enough known, and Mr. Palgrave's _Treasury_, with Mr. Bullen's and Bell's _Songs from the Dramatists_, have given an inferior currency, but still a currency, to the best of the remainder. The earlier we have spoken of. But the songs of Greene and his fellows, though charming, cannot compare with those of the more properly Jacobean poets. To name only the best of each, Ben Jonson gives us the exquisite "Queen and Huntress," which is perhaps the best-known piece of his whole work; the pleasant "If I freely may discover," and best of all--unsurpa.s.sed indeed in any language for rolling majesty of rhythm and romantic charm of tone--"Drink to me only with thine eyes." Again the songs in Beaumont and Fletcher stand very high, perhaps highest of all next to Shakespere's in respect of the "woodnote wild." If the s.n.a.t.c.h of only half articulate poetry of the "Lay a garland on my hea.r.s.e," of _The Maid's Tragedy_, is really Fletcher's, he has here equalled Shakespere himself. We may add to it the fantastic and charming "Beauty clear and fair," of _The Elder Brother_, the comic swing of "Let the bells ring," and "The fit's upon me now;" all the songs without exception in _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which is much less a drama than a miscellany of the most delightful poetry; the lively war-song in _The Mad Lover_, to which Dryden owed not a little; the catch, "Drink to-day and drown all sorrow;" the strange song of the dead host in _The Lover's Progress_; the exquisite "Weep no more," of _The Queen of Corinth_; the spirited "Let the mill go round," of _The Maid in the Mill_; the "Lovers rejoice," of _Cupid's Revenge_; the "Roses, their sharp spines being gone,"

which is one of the most Shakesperean things of _The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen_; the famous "Hence, all you vain-delights," of _The Nice Valour_, which Milton expanded into _Il Penseroso_, and the laughing song of the same play. This long catalogue only contains a part of the singularly beautiful song work of the great pair of dramatists, and as an example we may give one of the least known from _The Captain_:--

"Tell me, dearest, what is love?

'Tis a lightning from above; 'Tis an arrow, 'tis a fire, 'Tis a boy they call Desire.

'Tis a grave, Gapes to have Those poor fools that long to prove.

"Tell me more, are women true?

Yes, some are, and some as you.

Some are willing, some are strange Since you men first taught to change.

And till troth Be in both, All shall love to love anew.

"Tell me more yet, can they grieve?

Yes, and sicken sore, but live, And be wise, and delay When you men are as wise as they.

Then I see, Faith will be Never till they both believe."

The dirge of _Vittoria Corombona_ and the preparation for death of _The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ are Webster's sole but sufficient contributions to the list. The witch songs of Middleton's _Witch_, and the gipsy, or rather tramp, songs of _More Dissemblers besides Women_ and _The Spanish Gipsy_, have very high merit. The songs of _Patient Grissell_, which are pretty certainly Dekker's, have been noticed already. The otherwise worthless play of _The Thracian Wonder_, attributed to Webster and Rowley, contains an unusual number of good songs. Heywood and Ma.s.singer were not great at songs, and the superiority of those in _The Sun's Darling_ over the songs in Ford's other plays, seems to point to the authorship of Dekker. Finally, James Shirley has the song gift of his greater predecessors. Every one knows "The glories of our blood and state," but this is by no means his only good song; it worthily closes the list of the kind--a kind which, when brought together and perused separately, exhibits, perhaps, as well as anything else of equal compa.s.s, the extraordinary abundance of poetical spirit in the age. For songs like these are not to be hammered out by the most diligent ingenuity, not to be spun by the light of the most a.s.siduously fed lamp. The wind of such inspiration blows where, and only where, it listeth.

CHAPTER IX

MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES

During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon and the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_, there existed in England a quintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality, that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature can show a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature, except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all, except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character of writing, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died, within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the very highest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough to spare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatest characteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, and surpa.s.sed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the most eloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold.

Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speaking philosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or in literary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression, perhaps the superior of both his companions. The excellence of Browne is indeed more purely literary and intensely artistic first of all--a matter of expression rather than of substance,--while he is perhaps more flawed than any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist, or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vain to look anywhere for his superior.

John Milton--the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of his mastery of either harmony--was born in London on 9th December 1608, was educated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and control of his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in the somewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreak of the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part with extraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican and anti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity of Latin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649); was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time in order to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriously to have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of _Paradise Lost_, followed it with that of _Paradise Regained_, did not a little other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. He had been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month of her marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets on divorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said, intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The general abstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale of this book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case of Milton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, long treated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics early in the nineteenth century subst.i.tuted for this rigour a somewhat excessive admiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seen from the fact that a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, the unfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl," without a t.i.ttle of evidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and some innuendoes (indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) in Milton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less would be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that his intolerance surpa.s.sed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial abuse,--these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no small influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down his faults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fear of having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier.

The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured the estimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literary estimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjust criticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as by the operation of narrow and mistaken rules of prosody and poetry; and all these causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on _Lycidas_, which has been thought unintelligible. But it would be idle to contend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the most glowing of his modern panegyrists--Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, in regard to a champion so formidable, both as ally and as enemy, difficult to write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted.

Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them he produced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same time singularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty years of his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenile efforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisite poems of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Hymn on the Nativity_, the incomparable _Lycidas_, the _Comus_ (which I have the audacity to think his greatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the delicious fragments of the _Arcades_. Then his style abruptly changed, and for another twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets, relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intensely personal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. The third period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, and of the tragedy of _Samson Agonistes_, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose, including a curious _History of England_, wherein Milton expatiates with a singular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allows that he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods may be advantageously dealt with separately and in order.

Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside of our scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhaps sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and att.i.tudes towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of Lincoln,--critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,--are practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verse at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful _Epitaphium Damonis_ on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati.

The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known with some but not complete exactness. Milton was not an extremely precocious poet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the description of being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year of discretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the "Nativity." Two years later the beautiful sonnet on his three-and-twentieth year followed. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ date not before, but probably not much after, 1632; _Comus_ dating from 1634, and _Lycidas_ from 1637.

All these were written either in the later years at Cambridge, or in the period of independent study at Horton in Buckinghamshire--chiefly in the latter. Almost every line and word of these poems has been commented on and fought over, and I cannot undertake to summarise the criticism of others.

Among the greater memorabilia of the subject is that wonderful Johnsonism, the description of _Lycidas_ as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravely quarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to the oak in _Il Penseroso_, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was a pa.s.sionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, even if the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe it does, in Chaucer, also a favourite of Milton's. We have only s.p.a.ce here for first-hand criticism.

This body of work, then, is marked by two qualities: an extraordinary degree of poetic merit, and a still more extraordinary originality of poetic kind. Although Milton is always Milton, it would be difficult to find in another writer five poems, or (taking the _Allegro_ and its companion together) four, so different from each other and yet of such high merit. And it would be still more difficult to find poems so independent in their excellence. Neither the influence of Jonson nor the influence of Donne--the two poetical influences in the air at the time, and the latter especially strong at Cambridge--produced even the faintest effect on Milton. We know from his own words, and should have known even if he had not mentioned it, that Shakespere and Spenser were his favourite studies in English; yet, save in mere scattered phrases none of these poems owes anything to either. He has teachers but no models; masters, but only in the way of learning how to do, not what to do. The "certain vital marks," of which he somewhat arrogantly speaks, are indeed there. I do not myself see them least in the poem on the "Nativity," which has been the least general favourite. It shows youth in a certain inequality, in a slight overdose of ornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere even in Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisite rhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of the exordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb." It must be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a very rudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite s.n.a.t.c.hes in the dramatists had been s.n.a.t.c.hes merely; Spenser and his followers had chiefly confined themselves to elaborate stanzas of full length lines, and elsewhere the octo-syllabic couplet, or the quatrain, or the dangerous "eights and sixes," had been chiefly affected. The sestines and canzons and madrigals of the sonneteers, for all the beauty of their occasional flashes, have nothing like the gracious and sustained majesty of the "Nativity" piece. For technical perfection in lyric metre, that is not so much to be sung as said, this ode has no precedent rival. As for _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, who shall praise them fitly? They are among the few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are as delightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell on their technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precision with which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged and interchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a critical King Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might have taken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbed because skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubled because the flowers in _Lycidas_ do not grow at the same time, and because they think they could see stars through the "star-proof" trees of the _Arcades_.

The fragments of the masque just mentioned consist only of three songs and an address in rhymed couplets. Of the songs, those ending--

Such a rural queen, All Arcadia hath not seen,

are equal to anything that Milton has done; the first song and the address, especially the latter, do not fall far below them. But it is in _Comus_ that, if I have any skill of criticism, Milton's poetical power is at its greatest height. Those who judge poetry on the ground of bulk, or of originality of theme, or of anything else extra-poetical,--much more those (the greater number) who simply vary transmitted ideas,--may be scandalised at this a.s.sertion, but that will hardly matter much. And indeed the indebtedness of _Comus_ in point of subject (it is probably limited to the Odyssey, which is public property, and to George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_, which gave little but a few hints of story) is scarcely greater than that of _Paradise Lost_; while the form of the drama, a kind nearly as venerable and majestic as that of the epic, is completely filled. And in _Comus_ there is none of the stiffness, none of the _longueurs_, none of the almost ludicrous want of humour, which mar the larger poem. Humour indeed was what Milton always lacked; had he had it, Shakespere himself might hardly have been greater. The plan is not really more artificial than that of the epic; though in the latter case it is masked to us by the scale, by the grandeur of the personages, and by the familiarity of the images to all men who have been brought up on the Bible. The versification, as even Johnson saw, is the versification of _Paradise Lost_, and to my fancy at any rate it has a spring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely present later. As for its beauty in parts, _quis vituperavit_? It is impossible to single out pa.s.sages, for the whole is golden. The entering address of Comus, the song "Sweet Echo," the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and the magnificent eulogy of the "sun-clad power of chast.i.ty," would be the most beautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable "Sabrina fair" did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, for nearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by the reading of it, then indeed the critic's advice to a poet might be limited to this: "Give your days and nights to the reading of _Comus_."

The sole excuses for Johnson's amazing verdict on _Lycidas_ are that it is not quite so uniformly good, and that in his strictures on its "rhyme" and "numbers" he was evidently speaking from the point of view at which the regular couplet is regarded as the _ne plus ultra_ of poetry. There are indeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it is introduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem to think that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is out of place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is some over-cla.s.sicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display of quite such sustained and varied power as in _Comus_. But what there is, is so exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison's hyperbole when he called _Lycidas_ the "high-water mark of English poetry."

High-water mark even in the physical world is a variable limit. Shakespere constantly, and some other poets here and there in short pa.s.sages go beyond Milton. But in the same s.p.a.ce we shall nowhere find anything that can outgo the pa.s.sage beginning "Alas what boots it," down to "head of thine," and the whole conclusion from "Return Alpheus." For melody of versification, for richness of images, for curious felicity of expression, these cannot be surpa.s.sed.