From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 7

which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul

...grew so fast within It broke the outward sh.e.l.l of sin, And so was hatched a cherubin.

Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Frances Quarles's _Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular cla.s.s of literature in the 17th century. The most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.

One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose _Hesperides_, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic ill.u.s.tration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A. Abbey.

Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a True Lent._ But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon companion at

...those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun; Where we such cl.u.s.ters had As made us n.o.bly wild, not mad.

And yet each verse of thine, Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.

Herrick's _n.o.ble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a cheerful grat.i.tude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and elevation of Herbert, but he surpa.s.sed him in the grace, melody, sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil. He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to "Julia," and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of _Carpe diem_ and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known poems, such as _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_, and _To Corinna, To Go a Maying._

Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin's Chapel at Loretto. He is best known to the general reader by his _Wishes for his Unknown Mistress_,

That not impossible she

which is included in most of the anthologies. His religious poetry expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St.

Theresa, "undaunted daughter of desires," who is the subject of a splendid apostrophe in his poem, _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is, in fact, a poet of pa.s.sages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits. In one of his Latin epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana:

Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum:

as englished by Dryden,

The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed.

Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of love songs--the _Mistress_--is a ma.s.s of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the _Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed the exiled court to France.

Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers--Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others--gallant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs--_To Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which occur the lines,

I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more--

and to _Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories" of his king, and declares that "stone-walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was Sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised a troop of horse for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament and fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite _Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp--graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling. Carew, however, showed a nicer sense of form than most of the fantastic school.

Some of his love songs are written with delicate art. There are n.o.ble lines in his elegy on Donne and in one pa.s.sage of his masque _Coelum Britannic.u.m_. In his poem ent.i.tled _The Rapture_ great splendor of language and imagery is devoted to the service of an unbridled sensuality. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and _On a Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth, correct manner of writing in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantly rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers. In such verses as Carew's _Encouragements to a Lover_, and George Wither's _The Manly Heart_,

If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be?--

we see the revolt against the high, pa.s.sionate, Sidneian love of the Elizabethan sonneteers, and the note of _persiflage_ that was to mark the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the n.o.ble and unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at Edinburgh in 1650.

My dear and only love, I pray That little world of thee Be governed by no other sway Than purest monarchy.

In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his mistress against _synods_ or _committees_ in her heart; swears to make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and, with that fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert, he adds, in words that have been often quoted,

He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all.

John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a musical composer of some merit. At his home Milton was surrounded with all the inflences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of the better cla.s.s. He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer, who wrote the airs to the songs in _Comus_. Milton's education was most careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge, where, from his personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called "The lady of Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country seat, he pa.s.sed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton was the most scholarly and the most truly cla.s.sical of English poets. His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's; and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance. "My father," he wrote, "destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters." He was also destined for the ministry, but, "coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what tyrany had invaded the Church,...I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were laid upon his head. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter," he says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds that his "natural haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living.

Milton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance. Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the war for liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his song was keyed to

the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised To height of n.o.blest temper, heroes old Arming to battle.

On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English poetry: the pa.s.sion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.

Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.

Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chast.i.ty and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author "foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height."

But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.

This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems.

The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed language, with its fullness of meaning and allusion, make it worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's _La Semaine_, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elizabethans, and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new. In masque, elegy, and sonnet he set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.

In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for amus.e.m.e.nt, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.

He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his left hand only. There are pa.s.sages of fervid eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. But in general his sentences are long and involved, full of inversions and latinized constructions. Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the Fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his own position. These authorities he deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces. The very t.i.tles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader: _A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, ent.i.tled Of Reformation_. The most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on Toleration_, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.

Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, _Defensio pro Popululo Anglicano_, he overtaxed his eyes, and in 1654 became totally blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public occasions. By the Elizabethans the sonnets had been used mainly in love poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the thing became a trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the sonnet written on the ma.s.sacre of the Vaudois Protestants--"a collect in verse," it has been called--which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel. Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, but only a regret that the value of his service is impaired--

Will G.o.d exact day labor, light denied?

After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness and with dangers compa.s.sed round And solitude,

he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments finally took shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in 1667. This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was Milton's purpose to

a.s.sert eternal Providence And justify the ways of G.o.d to men,

or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "G.o.d the father turns a school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "G.o.d's good boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature, and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some Republican leader when the Good Old Cause went down.

What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable will And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield.

But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualification, _Paradise Lost_ remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more ma.s.sive and splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like Tertullian's Latin, to a river of molten gold. Of the countless single beauties that sow his page

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Valombrosa,

there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance and mult.i.tude of thoughts which have caused the _Paradise Lost_ to be called the book of universal knowledge. "The heat of Milton's mind,"

said Dr. Johnson, "might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."

The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton's description of the creation, for example, with corresponding pa.s.sages in Sylvester's _Divine Weeks and Works_ (translated from the Huguenot poet, Du Bartas), which was, in some sense, his original. But the most heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton. There are no strains in _Paradise Lost_ so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the majestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to Urania, which open the third and seventh books. Every-where, too, one reads between the lines. We think of the dissolute cavaliers, as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of "the sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine," or when the Puritan turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce

court amours Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenade which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.

And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of the Seraph Abdiel "faithful found among the faithless."

Nor number nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth or change his constant mind, Though single. From amidst them forth he pa.s.sed, Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained Superior, nor of violence feared aught: And with retorted scorn his back he turned On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.

_Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ were published in 1671. The first of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander, in his _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 1610. The superiority of _Paradise Lost_ to its sequel is not without significance. The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their G.o.d was the Hebrew Jehovah, whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. They identified themselves in thought with his chosen people, with the militant theocracy of the Jews.

Their sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. "To your tents, O Israel," was the cry of the London mob when the bishops were committed to the Tower. And when the fog lifted, on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed, "Let G.o.d arise and let his enemies be scattered: like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive them away."

_Samson Agonistes_, though Hebrew in theme and spirit, was in form a Greek tragedy. It has chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the so-called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was unchanged, and there were no intervals of time between the acts. In accordance with the rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once, and there was no violent action. The death of Samson is related by a messenger. Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is obvious. He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and alone among enemies; given over