Amenities of Literature Part 27

THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT.

Not many years intervened between the uncouth gorgeousness of HAWES, the homely sense of BARCLAY, the anomalous genius of SKELTON, and the pure poetry of Henry Howard the EARL of SURREY. In the poems of SURREY, and his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt,[1] the elder, the age of taste, if not of genius, opens on us. Dryden and Pope sometimes seem to appear two centuries before their date. There is no chronology in the productions of real genius; for, whenever a great master appears, he advances his art to a period which labour, without creation, toils for centuries to reach.

The great reformer of our poetry, he who first from his own mind, without a model, displayed its permanent principles, was the poetic Earl of Surrey. There was inspiration in his system, and he freed his genius from the barbaric taste or the undisturbed dulness which had prevailed since the days of Chaucer. His ear was musical, and he formed a metrical structure with the melodies of our varied versification, rejecting the rude rhythmical rhyme which had hitherto prevailed in our poetry. He created a poetic diction, and graceful involutions; a finer selection of words, and a delicacy of expression, were now subst.i.tuted for vague diffusion, and homeliness of phrases and feeble rhymes, or, on the other hand, for that vitiated style of crude pedantic Latinisms, such as "purpure, aureate, pulchritude, celature, facunde," and so many others, laborious nothings! filling the verse with noise. The contemplative and tender SURREY charms by opening some picturesque scene or dwelling on some impressive incident. He had discerned the error of those inartificial writers, whose minute puerility, in their sterile abundance, detailed till nothing was remembered, and described, till nothing was perceptible. Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. SURREY struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor three centuries past.

These rare qualities in a poet at such a period would of themselves form an era in our literature; but SURREY also extended their limits; the disciple of Chaucer was also the pupil of Petrarch, and the Earl of SURREY composed the _first sonnets_ in the English language, with the amatory tenderness and the condensed style of its legitimate structure.

Dr. Nott further claims the honour for Surrey of the invention of heroic blank verse; Surrey's version of Virgil being unrhymed.

When Warton suggested that Surrey borrowed the idea of blank verse from Trissino's "Italia Liberata," he seems to have been misled by the inaccurate date of 1528, which he affixed to the publication of that epic. Trissino's epic did not appear till 1547,[2] and Surrey perished in the January of that year. It was indeed long a common opinion that Trissino invented the _versi sciolti_, or blank verse, though Quadrio confesses that such had been used by preceding poets, whose names he has recorded. The mellifluence and flexibility of the vowelly language were favourable to unrhymed verse; while the poverty of the poetic diction, and the unmusical verse of France, could never venture to show itself without the glitter of rhyme. The heroic blank verse, however, was an after-thought of Surrey: he first composed his unrhymed verse in the long Alexandrine, had afterwards felicitously changed it for the decasyllabic verse, but did not live to correct the whole of his version. Surrey could not therefore have designed the pauses and the cadences of blank verse in his first choice, nor will they be found in his last. Nor can it be conceded that blank verse was wholly unknown among us. Webbe, a critic long after, in the reign of Elizabeth, considers the author of Pierce Ploughman as "the first whom he had met with who observed the quant.i.ty of our verse, _without the curiosity of rhyme_."

Dr. Nott, with editorial ardour, considers that the unfinished model of Surrey was the prototype of all subsequent blank verse, and was also the origin of its introduction into dramatic composition. A sweeping conclusion! when we consider the artificial structure of our blank verse from the days of Milton, who, not without truth, a.s.serted that "he first gave the example of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming." This indeed has been denied to Milton by those who look to dates, and have no ear; and are apt to imagine that rhymeless lines, mere couplets, with ten well-counted syllables in each, must necessarily form blank verse. Dr. Nott, in quoting the eulogy of Ascham on this n.o.ble effort of Surrey "to bring our national poetry to perfection," has omitted to add what followed, namely, the censure of Surrey for not having rejected our heroic verse altogether, and subst.i.tuted the hexameter of Virgil, in English verse.

It is therefore quite evident that Ascham had formed no conception of blank verse, no more than had Surrey, such as it was to be formed by the ear of Milton, and by some of his successors. All beginnings are obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.

Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological history, of this poetic Earl of SURREY be now written, it would a.s.suredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high pa.s.sions, and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence, while we know but little of the person.

The youth of SURREY, and his life, hardly pa.s.sed beyond that period, betrayed the buoyancy of a spirit vehement and quick, but rarely under guidance. Reckless truth, in all its openness and its sternness, was his habit, and glory was his pa.s.sion; but in this restlessness of generous feelings his anger too easily blazed forth. He was haughty among his peers, and he did not even scorn to chastise an inferior. We are not surprised at discovering that one of so unreserved a temper should in that jealous reign more than once have suffered confinement. But the youthful hero who pursued to justice a relative and a court favourite, for a blow, by which that relative had outraged Surrey's faithful companion--he who would eat flesh in Lent--he who issued one night to break the windows of the citizens, to remind them that they were a sinful race, however that might have been instigated by zeal for "the new religion"--all such things betrayed his enthusiastic daring, but his deeds, to become splendid, depended on their direction. The lofty notions he attached to his descent; his proud shield quartering the arms of the Confessor, which the duke, his father, dared not show to a jealous monarch; his feats of arms at the barriers, and his military conduct in his campaigns,

----------Who saw Kelsal blaze, Landrecy burnt, and battered Boulogne render; At Montreuil's gate hopeless of a recure (recovery),

there, where that twin-spirit, his beloved a.s.sociate, Clere, to save his wounded friend, had freely yielded his own life; his magnificence as a courtier, the companion of the princely Richmond; all "the joy and feast with a king's son;" his own record of the brilliant days, and the soothing fancies of "proud Windsor:" "its large open courts;" "the gravelled ground for the foaming horse;" "the palm-play;" "the stately seats and dances;" "the secret groves," and "the wild forest, with cry of hounds;" and more than all, the mysterious pa.s.sion for "the fair Geraldine," cover the misty shade of Surrey with a cloud of glory, which, while it veils the man from our sight, seems to enlarge the object we gaze on.

We see this youth, he who first taught the English Muse accents she had never before tried, hurried from his literary seclusion to be immolated on the scaffold, by the arts of a remorseless rival, of him whose pride at last sent him to the block, and who signed the death-warrant of his own brother! It was at a moment when the dying monarch, as the breath was fleeting from his lips, once in his life was voiceless to condemn a state victim, that Somerset took up the stamp which Henry used, to affix it to the death-warrant of SURREY. Victim of his own domestic circle!

The father disunited with the son, from fear or jealousy; the mother separated from the father, to the last vowing unforgiving vengeance; a sister disnatured of all kin, hastening to be the voluntary accuser of her father and her brother! These domestic hatreds were the evil spirits which raged in the house of the Howards, and hurried on the fate of the accomplished, the poetic, the hapless Earl of Surrey.

A tale of such grandeur and such woe pa.s.sed away unheeded even by a slight record, so inexpert were the few writers of those days, and probably so perilous was their curiosity. The pretended trial of Surrey, who being no lord of parliament, was tried by a timorous jury at Guildhall, seems to have been studiously suppressed, and the last solemn act of his life, "the leaving it," is alike concealed. Even in the registers of public events by our chroniclers, they unanimously pa.s.s over the glorious name and the miserable death--to spare the monarch's or the victim's honour.

The poems of SURREY were often read, as their multiplied editions show; but of the n.o.ble poet and his Geraldine, tradition had not sent down even an imperfect tale. In this uncertainty, the world was disposed to listen to any romantic story of such genius and love and chivalry.

The secret history of SURREY was at length revealed, and the gravity of its discloser vouched for its authenticity. Who would doubt the testimony of plain Anthony a Wood?

SURREY is represented hastening on a chivalric expedition to Italy; at Florence he challenges the universe, that his Geraldine was the peerless of the beautiful. In his travels, Cornelius Agrippa exhibited to Surrey, in a magical mirror, his fair mistress as she was occupied at the moment of inspection. He beheld her sick, weeping in bed, reading his poems, in all the grief of absence. This incident set spurs to his horse. At Florence he hastened to view the chamber which had witnessed the birth of so much beauty. At the court he affixed his challenge, and maintained this emprise in tilt and tourney. The Duke of Florence, flattered that a Florentine lady should be renowned by the prowess of an English n.o.bleman, invited Surrey to a residence at his court. But our Amadis more n.o.bly purposed to hold on his career through all the courts of Italy, shivering the lances of whoever would enter the lists, whether "Christian, Jew, or Saracen." Suddenly the Quixotism ends, by this paragon of chivalry being recalled home by the royal command.

This Italian adventure seemed congenial with the romantic mystery in which the poet had involved the progress of his pa.s.sion for his poetic mistress. He had himself let us into some secrets. Geraldine came from "Tuscany;" Florence was her ancient seat, her sire was an earl, her dame of "princes' blood," "yet she was fostered by milk of an Irish breast;"

and from her tender years in Britain "she tasted costly food with a king's child." The amatorial poet even designates the spots hallowed by his pa.s.sion; he first saw her at Hunsdon, Windsor chased him from her sight, and at Hampton Court "first wished her for mine!"

These hints and these localities were sufficient to irritate the vague curiosity of Surrey's readers, and more particularly of our critical researchers, of whom Horace Walpole first ventured to explain the inexplicable. With singular good fortune, and from slight grounds, Walpole conjectured that Geraldine was no Italian dame, but Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, one of the daughters of the Earl of Kildare; the family were often called the Geraldines. The Italian descent from the Geraldi was made out by a spurious genealogy. The challenge and the tournament no one doubted. But some harder knots were to be untied; and our theoretical historian, unfurnished by facts and dates, it has been recently shown, discovered some things which never existed.

But every writer followed in the track. Warton compliments the sagacity of Walpole, and embroiders the narrative. The historian of our poetry not only details the incident of the magical mirror, but adds that "the imagination of Surrey was _heated anew_ by this _interesting spectacle_!" He therefore had no doubt of the reality; and, indeed, to confirm the whole adventure of the romantic chivalry, he refers the curious to a finely sculptured shield which is still preserved by the Dukes of Norfolk. The Italian adventures of Surrey, and all that Walpole had erroneously suggested, are fully accepted, and our critic observes--"Surrey's life throws so much light on the character and the subjects of his poetry, that it is almost impossible to consider the one without exhibiting the _few anecdotes_ of the other." But the critical sagacity of Warton did not wholly desert him through all the circ.u.mstantial narrative, for suddenly his pen pauses, and he exclaims on these travels of Surrey, that "they have the air of a romance!"

And it was a romance! and it served for history many a year![3] This tale of literary delusion may teach all future investigators into obscure points of history to probe them by dates.

It was long after the days of Walpole and Warton, and even of George Ellis, that it was discovered that these travels into Italy by Surrey had been transferred literally from an "Historical Romance." A great wit, in Elizabeth's reign, Tom Nash, sent forth in "the Life of Jack Wilton, an unfortunate traveller," this whole legend of Surrey. The entire fiction of Nash annihilates itself by its extraordinary anachronisms.

In what respect Nash designed to palm the imposture of his "Historical Romance" on the world, may be left to be explained by some "Jack Wiltons" of our own. He says "all that in this _phantastical treatise_ I can promise is some _reasonable conveyance of history_, and variety of mirth." Must we trust to their conscience for "the reasonable conveyance?"

We now trace the whole progress of this literary delusion.

On Surrey's ideal pa.s.sion, and on this pa.s.sage misconceived--

From Tuscan came my lady's worthy race; Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat--

the romancer inferred that Geraldine must be a fair Florentine; Surrey had alluded to the fanciful genealogy of the Geralds from the Geraldi.

On this single hint the romancer sends him on his aerial journey in this business of love and chivalry.

This romance, of which it is said only three copies are known, was published in 1594. Four years after, DRAYTON, looking about for subjects for his Ovidian epistles, eagerly seized on a legend so favourable for poetry, and Geraldine and Surrey supplied two amatory epistles. Anthony a Wood, finding himself without materials to frame a life of the poetic Surrey, had recourse to "the famous poet," as he calls Drayton, whom he could quote; for Drayton was a consecrated bard for the antiquary, since Selden had commented on his great topographical poem. But honest Anthony on this occasion was not honest enough. He did not tell the world that he had fallen on the romance itself, Drayton's sole authority. Literally and silently, our antiquary transcribed the fuller pa.s.sages from a volume he was ashamed to notice, disingenuously dropping certain incidents which would not have honoured the memory of Surrey. Thus the "phantastical" history for ever blots the authentic tomes of the grave _Athenae Oxonienses_. A single moment of scrutiny would have detected the whole fabricated narrative; but there is a charm in romance which bewitched our luckless Anthony.

Thus it happened that the romancer, on a misconception, constructs an imaginary fabric; the poet Drayton builds on the romancer; the sober antiquary on both; then the commentators stand upon the antiquary. Never was a house of cards of so many stories. The foundation, Surrey's poetic pa.s.sion, may be as fict.i.tious as the rest; for the visionary Geraldine, viewed in Agrippa's magic mirror was hardly a more mysterious shadow.

Not one of these writers was informed of what recent researches have demonstrated. They knew not that this Earl of Surrey in boyhood was betrothed to his lady, also a child--one of the customs to preserve wealth or power in great families of that day. These historians were unfurnished with any dates to guide them, and never suspected that when Surrey is made to set off on his travels in Italy, after a Donna Giraldi who had no existence, he was the father of two sons, and "the fair Geraldine" was only _seven_ years of age! that Surrey's first love broke out when she was _nine_; that he declared his pa.s.sion when she was about _thirteen_; and finally, that Geraldine, having attained to the womanly discretion of _fifteen_, dismissed the accomplished Earl of Surrey, with whom she never could be united, to accept the hand of old Sir Anthony Brown, aged sixty. Lady Brown disturbs the illusion of Geraldine, in the modest triumph of sixteen over sixty.

Dr. Nott is in trepidation for the domestic morality of the n.o.ble poet; yet some of these amatory sonnets may have been addressed to his betrothed. He has perplexed himself by a formal protest against the perils of Platonic love, but apologises for his hero in the manners of the age. It appears that not only the mistress of Petrarch, but those of Bayard the chevalier "sans reproche," and Sir Philip Sidney, were married women, with as crystalline reputations as their lovers. Nor should we omit the great friend of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a staid married man, notwithstanding his romantic pa.s.sion for Anne Bullen.

The courtly imitators of Petrarch had made love fashionable. It is evident that Surrey found nothing so absorbing in his pa.s.sion, whatever it might be; for whenever called into public employment he ceased to be Petrarch--which Petrarch never could, and possibly for a want of occupation. A small quant.i.ty of pa.s.sion, dexterously meted out, may be ample to inspire an amatorial poet. Neither Surrey nor Petrarch, accomplished lovers and poets, with all their mistress' coquetry and cruelty, broke their hearts in the tenderness of their ideas, or were consumed by "the perpetual fires" of their imagination.

We have now traced the literary delusion which long veiled the personal history of the Earl of Surrey, and which has duped so many ingenious commentators. The tale affords an additional evidence of that "confusion worse confounded" by truth and fiction, where the names are real, and the incidents fict.i.tious; a fatality which must always accompany "Historical Romances." The same mischance occurred to "The Cavalier" of DE FOE, often published under different t.i.tles, suitable to the designs of the editors, and which tale has been repeatedly mistaken for an authentic history written at the time. Under the a.s.sumed designation by "a Shropshire Gentleman," whole pa.s.sages have been transferred from the Romance into the authentic history of Nichols's Leicestershire--just as Anthony a Wood had felicitously succeeded in his historical authority of Tom Nash's "Life of Jack Wilton."

In the story of SURREY and WYATT, one circ.u.mstance is too precious to be pa.s.sed over. WYATT commenced as a writer nearly ten years before Surrey, and his earlier poetic compositions are formed in the old rhythmical school. His ma.n.u.scripts, which still exist, bear his own strong marks in every line to regulate their caesura; for our ancient poets, to satisfy the ear, were forced to depend on such artificial contrivances. It was in the strict intercourse of their literary friendship that the elder bard surrendered up the ancient barbarism, and by the revelation of his younger friend, studied an art which he had not himself discovered.

Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship with his nail. For many years Wyatt had smothered his native talent, by translation from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practise happier art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious. The immortal one to his "Lute," the usual musical instrument of the lover or the poet, as the guitar in Spain, composed with as much happiness as care, is the universal theme of every critic of English poetry.

His defrauded or romantic pa.s.sion for Anne Bullen often lends to his effusions a deep mysterious interest, when we recollect that the poet alludes to a rival who must have made him tremble as he wrote.

Who list to hunt? I know where is an hind!

But as for me alas! I may no more, The vain travail hath wearied me so sore; I am of them that furthest come behind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain; Graven with diamonds, in letters plain, There is written, her fair neck round about-- "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, _And wild to hold, though I seem tame_."

We perceive Wyatt's keen perception of character in the last verse, admirably expressive of the playfulness and levity of the thoughtless but susceptible Anne Bullen, which never left her when in the Tower or on the scaffold. The poems of WYATT accompanied the unhappy queen in her imprisonment; and it was Wyatt's sister who received her prayer-book with her last smile, for the block before her could not disturb the tenderness of her affections.

WYATT is an ethical poet, more pregnant with reflection than imagination; he was intimately conversant with the world; and it is to be regretted that our poet has only left three satires, the first Horatian Epistles we possess. These are replete with the urbanity and delicate irony of the Roman, but what was then still unexampled, flowing with the fulness and freedom of the versification of Dryden. Wyatt had much salt, but no gall.

WYATT excelled SURREY in his practical knowledge of mankind; he had been a sojourner in politic Madrid, and had been employed on active emba.s.sies. Surrey could only give the history of his own emotions, affections, and habits; he is the more interesting poet for us; but we admire a great man in Wyatt, one whose perception was not less subtile and acute, because it spread on a far wider surface of life.

WIAT, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was a nice observer of times, persons, and circ.u.mstances, knowing when to speak, and we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry thrown out by him produced three great revolutions--the fall of Wolsey, the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emanc.i.p.ation of England from the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, besides their connexion with Anne Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great Cardinal. One day Wyatt entering the king's closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humour, and to keep the Cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of "the curs baiting a butcher's dog." The application was obvious to the butcher's son of Ipswich, and we are told, for the subject but not the tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a falling minister was laid down by this address of the wit. It was with the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a pa.s.sion on the delay of his divorce, that, with a statesmanlike sympathy, appealing to the presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed, "Lord! that a man cannot repent him of his sin but by the pope's leave!" The hint was dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched!

When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a revolution, besides the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his counsel:--"b.u.t.ter the rooks' nests!"--that is, divide all these houses and lands with the n.o.bility and gentry.

Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.

Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould.

They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet's immortality from that friend's n.o.ble epitaph. In his epitaph, Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart--but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt's was

A head, where Wisdom's mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, As on a st.i.thy,[4] where some work of fame Was daily wrought.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Works of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt," by Dr.

Nott, form an important accession to our national literature. If we cannot always agree with the conclusions of our literary antiquary, we must value the variety of his researches, not less profound than extensive.

[2] "Tiraboschi," vol. vii.--Haym's "Bibliotheca Italiani." When Conybeare communicated the same information to Dr. Bliss, it must have been derived from Warton.