Halleck's New English Literature Part 19

"Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success."[3]

His works abound in ill.u.s.trations, a.n.a.logies, and striking imagery; but unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he appeals more to cold intellect than to the feelings. We are often pleased with his intellectual ingenuity, for instance, in likening the Schoolmen to spiders, spinning such stuff as webs are made of "out of no great quant.i.ty of matter."

He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but, unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the emotional depths of the soul.

THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY--LYRICAL VERSE

A Medium of Artistic Expression.--No age has surpa.s.sed the Elizabethan in lyrical poems, those "short swallow flights of song,"

as Tennyson defines them. The English Renaissance, unlike the Italian, did not achieve great success in painting. The Englishman embodied in poetry his artistic expression of the beautiful. Many lyrics are merely examples of word painting. The Elizabethan poet often began his career by trying to show his skill with the ingenious and musical arrangement of words, where an Italian would have used color and drawing on an actual canvas.

We have seen that in the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt and Surrey introduced into England from Italy the type of lyrical verse known as the sonnet. This is the most artificial of lyrics, because its rules prescribe a length of exactly fourteen lines and a definite internal structure.

The sonnet was especially popular with Elizabethan poets. In the last ten years of the sixteenth century, more than two thousand sonnets were written. Even Shakespeare served a poetic apprenticeship by writing many sonnets as well as semi-lyrical poems, like _Venus and Adonis_.

We should, however, remember that the sonnet is only one type of the varied lyric expression of the age. Many Elizabethan song books show that lyrics were set to music and used on the most varied occasions.

There were songs for weddings, funerals, dances, banquets,--songs for the tinkers, the barbers, and other workmen. If modern readers chance to pick up an Elizabethan novel, like Thomas Lodge's _Rosalynde_ (1590), they are surprised to find that prose will not suffice for the lover, who must "evaporate" into song like this:--

"Love in my bosom like a bee, Doth suck his sweet.

Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet."

There are large numbers of Elizabethan lyrics apparently as spontaneous and unfettered as the song of the lark. The seeming artlessness of much of this verse should not blind us to the fact that an unusual number of poets had really studied the art of song.

Love Lyrics.--The subject of the Elizabethan sonnets is usually love. Sir Philip Sidney wrote many love sonnets, the best of which is the one beginning:--

"With how sad steps. O Moon, thou climb'st the Skies!"

Edmund Spencer composed fifty-eight sonnets in one year to chronicle his varied emotions as a lover. We may find among Shakespeare's 154 sonnets some of the greatest love lyrics in the language, such, for instance, as CXVI., containing the lines:--

"Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds";

or, as XVIII.:--

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease bath all too short a date.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade."

Sonnets came to be used in much the same way as a modern love letter or valentine. In the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, sonnets were even called "merchantable ware." Michael Drayton (1563-1631), a prolific poet, author of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, one of England's greatest war songs, tells how he was employed by a lover to write a sonnet which won the lady. Drayton's best sonnet is, _Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part_.

Outside of the sonnets, we shall find love lyrics in great variety.

One of the most popular of Elizabethan songs is Ben Jonson's:--

"Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine."

The Elizabethans were called a "nest of singing birds" because such songs as the following are not unusual in the work of their minor writers:--

"Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft To give my love good morrow!

Winds from the wind to please her mind, Notes from the lark I'll borrow."[4]

Pastoral Lyrics.--In Shakespeare's early youth it was the fashion to write lyrics about the delights of rustic life with sheep and shepherds. The Italians, freshly interesting in Vergil's _Georgics_ and _Bucolics_, had taught the English how to write pastoral verse.

The entire joyous world had become a Utopian sheep pasture, in which shepherds piped and fell in love with glorified sheperdesses. A great poet named one of his productions, _Shepherd's Calendar_ and Sir Philip Sidney wrote in poetic prose the pastoral romance _Arcadia_.

Christopher Marlowe's _The Pa.s.sionate Shepherd to his Love_ is a typical poetic expression of the fancied delight in pastoral life:--

"...we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals."

Miscellaneous Lyrics.--As the Elizabethan age progressed, the subject matter of the lyrics became broader. Verse showing consummate mastery of turns expressed the most varied emotions. Some of the greatest lyrics of the period are the songs interspersed in the plays of the dramatists, from Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays of Shakespeare, the greatest and most varied of Elizabethan lyrical poets, especially abound in such songs. Two of the best of these occur in his _Cymbeline_. One is the song--

"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,"

and the other is the dirge beginning:--

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun."

Ariel's songs in _The Tempest_ fascinate with the witchery of untrammeled existence. Two lines of a song from _Twelfth Night_ give an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the present as opposed to an elusive future:--

"What is love? 'tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter."

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN DONNE. _From the painting ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, South Kensington Museum._]

Two of the later Elizabethan poets, Ben Jonson and John Donne (1573-1631), specially impress us by their efforts to secure ingenious effects in verse. Ben Jonson often shows this tendency, as in trying to give a poetic definition of a kiss as something--

"So sugar'd, so melting, so soft, so delicious,"

and in showing so much ingenuity of expression in the cramping limits of an epitaph:--

"Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die, Which in life did harbor give To more virtue than doth live."

The poet most famous for a display of extreme ingenuity in verse is John Donne, a traveler, courtier, and finally dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, who possessed, to quote his own phrase, an "hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning." He paid less attention to artistic form than the earlier Elizabethans, showed more cynicism, chose the abstract rather than the concrete, and preferred involved metaphysical thought to simple sensuous images. He made few references to nature and few allusions to the characters of cla.s.sical mythology, but searched for obscure likenesses between things, and for conceits or far-fetched comparisons. In his poem, _A Funeral Elegy_, he shows these qualities in characterizing a fair young lady as:--

"One whose clear body was so pure and thin, Because it need disguise no thought within; 'Twas but a through-light scarf her mind to enroll, Or exhalation breathed out from her soul."

The idea in Shakespeare's simpler expression, "the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye," was expanded by Donne into:--

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string."

Donne does not always show so much fine-spun ingenuity, but this was the quality most imitated by a group of his successors. His claim to distinction rests on the originality and ingenuity of his verse, and perhaps still more on his influence over succeeding poets.[5]

EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599

[Ill.u.s.tration: EDMUND SPENSER._From a painting in Duplin Castle_.]

Life and Minor Poems.--For one hundred and fifty-two years after Chaucer's death, in 1400, England had no great poet until Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552. Spenser, who became the greatest non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan age, was twelve years older than Shakespeare.

His parents were poor, but fortunately in Elizabethan times, as well as in our own days, there were generous men who found their chief pleasure in aiding others. Such a man a.s.sisted Spenser in going to Cambridge. Spenser's benefactor was sufficiently wise not to give the student enough to dwarf the growth of self-reliance. We know that Spenser was a sizar at Cambridge, that is, one of those students who, to quote Macaulay, "had to perform some menial services. They swept the court; they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plate and poured out the ale of the rulers of society." We know further that Spenser was handicapped by ill health during a part of his course, for we find records of allowances paid "Spenser _aegrotanti_."

After leaving Cambridge Spenser went to the north of England, probably in the capacity of tutor. While there, he fell in love with a young woman whom he calls Rosalind. This event colored his after life.

Although she refused him, she had penetration enough to see in what his greatness consisted, and her opinion spurred him to develop his abilities as a poet. He was about twenty-five years old when he fell in love with Rosalind; and he remained single until he was forty-two, when he married an Irish maiden named Elizabeth. In honor of that event, he composed the _Epithalamion_, the n.o.blest marriage song in any literature. So strong are early impressions that even in its lines he seems to be thinking of Rosalind and fancying that she is his bride.