A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 24

As for Charles Cotton, his "Virgil Travesty" is deader than Scarron's, and deserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every one in the essay on "New Year's Day" are the best thing he did. But there are many excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint of the mere coa.r.s.eness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though he was also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody which distinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was one of the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms and write rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been a little undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose.

Thomas Stanley has been cla.s.sed above as a translator because he would probably have liked to have his scholarship thus brought into prominence.

It was, both in ancient and modern tongues, very considerable. His _History of Philosophy_ was a cla.s.sic for a very long time; and his edition of aeschylus had the honour of revision within the nineteenth century by Porson and by Butler. It is not certain that Bentley did not borrow from him; and his versions of Anacreon, of various other Greek lyrists, of the later Latins, and of modern writers in Spanish and Italian are most remarkable. But he was also an original poet in the best Caroline style of lyric; and his combination of family (for he was of the great Stanley stock), learning, and genius gave him a high position with men of letters of his day. Sidney G.o.dolphin, who died very young fighting for the King in Hopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificently celebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragments of his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known.

None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time, and very little later; while the MSS. are not in very accomplished form, and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, of G.o.dolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the _Fourth aeneid_ has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precocious poet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on the other side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barely twenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, _Horae Vacivae_, of prose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side, and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixed kinds--sacred and profane, serious and comic--and the best of them, such as "The Call" and "The Lure," have a slender but most attractive vein of fantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famous Lord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert to the Church of England, left ma.n.u.script pieces, human and divine, which were printed by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; while Bishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me no more how fair she is," never falls below a level much above the average.

The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and exist in numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard to disentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference in Dryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ and quotations in Johnson's _Life of Cowley_. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thought and phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he does not often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those who have been mentioned. A few examples of this cla.s.s may be given:--

"Through a low Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie The narrow path frequented only by The forest tyrants when they bore their prey From open dangers of discovering day.

Pa.s.sed through this desert valley, they were now Climbing an easy hill, whose every bough Maintained a feathered chorister to sing Soft panegyrics, and the rude winds bring Into a murmuring slumber; whilst the calm Morn on each leaf did hang the liquid balm With an intent, before the next sun's birth To drop it in those wounds which the cleft earth Received from's last day's beams. The hill's ascent Wound up by action, in a large extent Of leafy plains, shows them the canopy Beneath whose shadow their large way did lie."

CHAMBERLAYNE, _Pharonnida_, iv. 1. 199-216.

It will be observed that of these eighteen lines all but _four_ are overrun; and the resemblance to the couplet of Keats's _Endymion_ should not be missed.

"April is past, then do not shed, And do not waste in vain, Upon thy mother's earthy bed Thy tears of silver rain.

"Thou canst not hope that the cold earth By wat'ring will bring forth A flower like thee, or will give birth To one of the like worth.

"'Tis true the rain fall'n from the sky Or from the clouded air, Doth make the earth to fructify, Ann makes the heaven more fair.

"With thy dear face it is not so, Which, if once overcast, If thou rain down thy showers of woe, They, like the sirens, blast.

"Therefore, when sorrow shall becloud Thy fair serenest day, Weep not: thy sighs shall be allow'd To chase the storm away.

"Consider that the teeming vine, If cut by chance [it] weep, Doth bear no grapes to make the wine, But feels eternal sleep."

KYNASTON.

"Be conquer'd by such charms; there shall Not always such enticements fall.

What know we whether that rich spring of light Will staunch his streams Of golden beams Ere the approach of night?

"How know we whether't shall not be The last to either thee or me?

He can at will his ancient brightness gain, But thou and I When we shall die Shall still in dust remain."

JOHN HALL.

This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They stand more by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history, marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's burning pa.s.sion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circ.u.mscribes their cla.s.s even more distinctly.

They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great measure--some think out of all measure--in poetry. In the best of them there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the amatory fashion of this world pa.s.seth; they do not in the least undervalue it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my thinking, little coa.r.s.eness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical pleasures as any cla.s.sic or any mediaevalist; but they have what no cla.s.sic except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,--the fine rapture, the pa.s.sing but transforming madness which brings merely physical pa.s.sion _sub specie aeternitatis_; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that a.n.a.lytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the chivalric rapture and the cla.s.sical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker moods of pa.s.sion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the physical is (to antic.i.p.ate a famous word of which more presently) always blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them--that the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will read Carew's _Rapture_, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with Adam in _Paradise Lost_, I should like to ask him on which side, according to his honour and conscience, the coa.r.s.eness lies. I have myself no hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the author of _Tetrachordon_, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the lines to "A. L."

There are other matters to be considered in the determination of the critical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been rather odd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restoration threw on all works of "the last age," and which deepened as the school of Dryden pa.s.sed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowley tradition were first exhumed for the purposes of _post-mortem_ examination by and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member of the cla.s.s. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend the Metaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnson against the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in his generalisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and used by Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by any one who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologically and by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. Still Johnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who have very little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity of expression as if it had been a deliberate subst.i.tution of alloy for gold.

The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves to any one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation than Johnson's training and a.s.sociations enabled him to apply; and even the worst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, that of "making the common as though it were not common." Towards the end of the eighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revived with taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it so happened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder and more irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaint but less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose writers like Burton, Browne, and Taylor, or to the ma.s.sive splendours of the Elizabethan poets proper.

The poetry of the Caroline age was, therefore, a little slurred, and this mishap of falling between two schools has constantly recurred to it. Some critics even who have done its separate authors justice, have subsequently indulged in palinodes, have talked about decadence and Alexandrianism and what not. The majority have simply let the Cavalier Poets (as they are sometimes termed by a mere historical coincidence) be something more than the victims of the schools that preceded and followed them. The lovers of the school of good sense which Waller founded regard the poets of this chapter as extravagant concettists; the lovers of the Elizabethan school proper regard them as effeminate triflers. One of Milton's gorgeous but constantly illogical phrases about the poets of his day may perhaps have created a prejudice against these poets. But Milton was a politician as well as a poet, a fanatic as well as a man of letters of seldom equalled, and never, save in two or three cases, surpa.s.sed powers. He was also a man of a more morose and unamiable private character than any other great poet the world has known except Racine. The easy _bonhomie_ of the Caroline muse repelled his austerity; its careless good-breeding shocked his middle-cla.s.s and Puritan Philistinism; its laxity revolted his principles of morality.

Not improbably the vein of sympathy which discovers itself in the exquisite verse of the _Comus_, of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, of _Lycidas_ itself, infuriated him (as such veins of sympathy when they are rudely checked and turned from their course will often do) with those who indulged instead of checking it. But because _Lycidas_ is magnificent, and _Il Penseroso_ charming poetry, we are not to think meanly of "Fair Daffodils," or "Ask me no more," of "Going to the Wars," or "Tell me no more how fair she is."

Let us clear our minds of this cant, and once more admit, as the student of literature always has to remind himself, that a sapphire and diamond ring is not less beautiful because it is not a marble palace, or a bank of wild flowers in a wood because it is not a garden after the fashion of Lenotre.

In the division of English poetry which we have been reviewing, there are to be found some of the most exquisite examples of the gem and flower order of beauty that can be found in all literature. When Herrick bids Perilla

"Wind me in that very sheet Which wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst implore The G.o.ds' protection but the night before: Follow me weeping to my turf, and there Let fall a primrose and with it a tear; Then lastly, let some weekly strewings be Devoted to the memory of me.

_Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep_ _Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep;_"

or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style--

"In this world, _the Isle of Dreams_, While we sit by sorrow's streams, Tears and terrors are our themes;"

when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to, of which he has almost the secret, cries

"_Oh, love me then, and now begin it,_ _Let us not lose this present minute;_ _For time and age will work that wrack_ _Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;_"

when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in this splendid sally--

"So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea, A star about the Arctic circle may Than ours yield clearer light; _yet that but shall_ _Serve at the frozen pilot's funeral_:"

when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks,--the fire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most careless and unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into those perfect verses which hardly even Burns and Sh.e.l.ley have equalled since,--it is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatest poets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so often cause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicity of language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem so easy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of a sensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the loftiest spirituality.

When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found to be based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-driven metaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period of literature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, they are said to be "decadence," "autumn," "over-ripe fruit," "sunset," and so forth. These pretty a.n.a.logies have done much harm in literary history. Of the Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata non perde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna." If there is any meaning about the phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the idea of approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, in literature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction.

An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (very properly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. But literature is not short-lived. There was no sign of poetry dying when Sh.e.l.ley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakespere lived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthology or of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods of difference. There are no periods of decay in literature so long as anything good is produced; and when nothing good is produced, it is only a sign that the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much that was good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. What is more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, some of which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover of poetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of all the great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. For the unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, for Dante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poets we have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrick and Milton's earlier poems; between the Caroline poets, major and minor, as just reviewed on the one hand, and _The Faerie Queene_ on the other. But I certainly would give _Paradise Regained_ for some score of poems of the writers just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a few pa.s.sages (I would not give those) of _Paradise Lost_. And, as I have endeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparative estimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon to weigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, and in an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that even of the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his own kind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard of most of the poets just surveyed, both these questions can be answered with an unhesitating affirmative. If we had not these poets, one particular savour, one particular form, of the poetical rapture would be lacking to the poetical expert; just as if what Herrick himself calls "the brave Burgundian wine" were not, no amount of claret and champagne could replace it. For pa.s.sionate sense of the good things of earth, and at the same time for mystical feeling of their insecurity, for exquisite style without the frigidity and the over-correctness which the more deliberate stylists frequently display, for a blending of Nature and art that seems as if it must have been as simply instinctive in all as it certainly was in some, the poets of the Tribe of Ben, of the Tribe of Donne, who ill.u.s.trated the period before Puritanism and Republicanism combined had changed England from merriment to sadness, stand alone in letters. We have had as good since, but never the same--never any such blending of cla.s.sical frankness, of mediaeval simplicity and chivalry, of modern reflection and thought.[61]

[61] Since this book first appeared, some persons whose judgment I respect have expressed to me surprise and regret that I have not given a higher and larger place to Henry Vaughan. A higher I cannot give, because I think him, despite the extreme beauty of his thought and (more rarely) of his expression, a most imperfect poet; nor a larger, because that would involve a critical arguing out of the matter, which would be unsuitable to the plan and scale of this book. Had he oftener written as he wrote in the famous poem referred to in the text, or as in the magnificent opening of "The World"--

"I saw Eternity the other night, _Like a great ring of pure and endless light_, All calm as it was bright,"

there would be much more to say of him. But he is not master of the expression suitable to his n.o.ble and precious thought except in the briefest bursts--bursts compared to which even Crashaw's are sustained and methodical. His admirers claim for "The Retreat" the germ of Wordsworth's great ode, but if any one will compare the two he will hardly complain that Vaughan has too little s.p.a.ce here.

CHAPTER XI

THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD

Two great names remain to be noticed in the Elizabethan drama (though neither produced a play till after Elizabeth was dead), some interesting playwrights of third or fourth-rate importance have to be added to them, and in a postscript we shall have to gather up the minor or anonymous work, some of it of very high excellence, of the second division of our whole subject, including plays of the second, third, and fourth periods. But with this fourth period we enter into what may really be called by comparison (remembering always what has been said in the last chapter) a period of decadence, and at its latter end it becomes very decadent indeed. Only in Ford perhaps, of our named and individual authors in this chapter, and in him very rarely, occur the flashes of sheer poetry which, as we have seen in each of the three earlier chapters on the drama, lighten the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists proper with extraordinary and lavish brilliance. Not even in Ford are to be found the whole and perfect studies of creative character which, even leaving Shakespere out of the question, are to be found earlier in plays and playwrights of all kinds and strengths, from _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Vittoria Corombona_, to _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_ and _A Cure for a Cuckold_. The tragedies have Ben Jonson's labour without his force, the comedies his coa.r.s.eness and lack of inspiriting life without his keen observation and incisive touch. As the taste indeed turned more and more from tragedy to comedy, we get attempts on the part of playwrights to win it back by a return to the b.l.o.o.d.y and monstrous conceptions of an earlier time, treated, however, without the redeeming features of that time, though with a little more coherence and art. Ma.s.singer's _Unnatural Combat_, and Ford's _'Tis Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e_, among great plays, are examples of this: the numerous minor examples are hardly worth mentioning. But the most curious symptom of all was the gradual and, as it were, imperceptible loss of the secret of blank verse itself, which had been the instrument of the great triumphs of the stage from Marlowe to Dekker. Something of this loss of grasp may have been noticed in the looseness of Fletcher and the over-stiffness of Jonson: it is perceptible distinctly even in Ford and Ma.s.singer. But as the Restoration, or rather the silencing of the theatres by the Commonwealth approaches, it becomes more and more evident until we reach the chaotic and hideous jumble of downright prose and verse that is neither prose nor verse, noticeable even in the early plays of Dryden, and chargeable no doubt with the twenty years' return of the English drama to the comparative barbarism of the couplet. This apparent loss of ear and rhythm-sense has been commented on already in reference to Lovelace, Suckling (himself a dramatist), and others of the minor Caroline poets; but it is far more noticeable in drama, and resulted in the production, by some of the playwrights of the transition period under Charles I. and Charles II., of some of the most amorphous botches in the way of style that disfigure English literature.

With the earliest and best work of Philip Ma.s.singer, however, we are at any rate chronologically still at a distance from the lamentable close of a great period. He was born in 1583, being the son of Arthur Ma.s.singer, a "servant" (pretty certainly in the gentle sense of service) to the Pembroke family. In 1602 he was entered at St. Alban's Hall in Oxford: he is supposed to have left the university about 1609, and may have begun writing plays soon. But the first definite notice of his occupation or indeed of his life that we have is his partic.i.p.ation (about 1614) with Daborne and Field in a begging letter to the well-known manager Henslowe for an advance of five pounds on "the new play," nor was anything of his printed or positively known to be acted till 1622, the date of _The Virgin Martyr_.

From that time onwards he appears frequently as an author, though many of his plays were not printed till after his death in 1640. But nothing is known of his life. He was buried on 18th March in St. Saviour's, Southwark, being designated as a "stranger,"--that is to say, not a parishioner.

Thirty-seven plays in all, or thirty-eight if we add Mr. Bullen's conjectural discovery, _Sir John Barneveldt_, are attributed to Ma.s.singer; but of these many have perished, Ma.s.singer having somehow been specially obnoxious to the ravages of Warburton's cook. Eighteen survive; twelve of which were printed during the author's life. Ma.s.singer was thus an industrious and voluminous author, one of many points which make Professor Minto's comparison of him to Gray a little surprising. He was, both at first and later, much given to collaboration,--indeed, there is a theory, not without colour from contemporary rumour, that he had nearly if not quite as much to do as Beaumont with Fletcher's great work. But oddly enough the plays which he is known to have written alone do not, as in other cases, supply a very sure test of what is his share in those which he wrote conjointly. _The Old Law_, a singular play founded on a similar conception to that in the late Mr. Anthony Trollope's _Fixed Period_, is attributed also to Rowley and Dekker, and has sometimes been thought to be so early that Ma.s.singer, except as a mere boy, could have had no hand in it. The contradictions of critics over _The Virgin Martyr_ (by Ma.s.singer and Dekker) have been complete; some peremptorily handing over all the fine scenes to one, and some declaring that these very scenes could only be written by the other. It is pretty certain that the argumentative theological part is Ma.s.singer's; for he had a strong liking for such things, while the pa.s.sages between Dorothea and her servant Angelo are at once more delicate than most of his work, and more regular and even than Dekker's. No companion is, however, a.s.signed to him in _The Unnatural Combat_, which is probably a pretty early and certainly a characteristic example of his style. His demerits appear in the exaggerated and crude devilry of the wicked hero, old Malefort (who cheats his friend, makes away with his wife, kills his son in single combat, and conceives an incestuous pa.s.sion for his daughter), in the jerky alternation and improbable conduct of the plot, and in the merely extraneous connection of the farcical scenes. His merits appear in the stately versification and ethical interest of the debate which precedes the unnatural duel, and in the spirited and well-told apologue (for it is almost that) of the needy soldier, Belgarde, who is bidden not to appear at the governor's table in his shabby clothes, and makes his appearance in full armour. The debate between father and son may be given:--

_Malef. sen._ "Now we are alone, sir; And thou hast liberty to unload the burthen Which thou groan'st under. Speak thy griefs.

_Malef. jun._ I shall, sir; But in a perplex'd form and method, which You only can interpret: Would you had not A guilty knowledge in your bosom, of The language which you force me to deliver So I were nothing! As you are my father I bend my knee, and, uncompell'd profess My life, and all that's mine, to be your gift; And that in a son's duty I stand bound To lay this head beneath your feet and run All desperate hazards for your ease and safety: But this confest on my part, I rise up, And not as with a father (all respect, Love, fear, and reverence cast off) but as A wicked man I thus expostulate with you.

Why have you done that which I dare not speak, And in the action changed the humble shape Of my obedience, to rebellious rage And insolent pride? and with shut eyes constrain'd me, I must not see, nor, if I saw it, shun it.

In my wrongs nature suffers, and looks backward, And mankind trembles to see me pursue What beasts would fly from. For when I advance This sword as I must do, against your head, Piety will weep, and filial duty mourn, To see their altars which you built up in me In a moment razed and ruined. That you could (From my grieved soul I wish it) but produce To qualify, not excuse your deed of horror, One seeming reason that I might fix here And move no farther!

_Malef. sen._ Have I so far lost A father's power, that I must give account Of my actions to my son? or must I plead As a fearful prisoner at the bar, while he That owes his being to me sits a judge To censure that which only by myself Ought to be question'd? mountains sooner fall Beneath their valleys and the lofty pine Pay homage to the bramble, or what else is Preposterous in nature, ere my tongue In one short syllable yield satisfaction To any doubt of thine; nay, though it were A certainty disdaining argument!

Since though my deeds wore h.e.l.l's black lining, To thee they should appear triumphal robes, Set off with glorious honour, thou being bound, To see with my eyes, and to hold that reason That takes or birth or fashion from my will.

_Malef. jun._ This sword divides that slavish knot.

_Malef. sen._ It cannot: It cannot, wretch, and if thou but remember From whom thou had'st this spirit, thou dar'st not hope it.