A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 6

To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only in you my song begins and endeth."

Nor is its promise belied by those which follow, and which are among the earliest and the most charming of the rich literature of songs that really are songs--songs to music--which the age was to produce. All the scanty remnants of his other verse are instinct with the same qualities, especially the splendid dirge, "Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread," and the pretty lines "to the tune of Wilhelmus van Na.s.sau." I must quote the first:--

"Ring out your bells! let mourning shows be spread, For Love is dead.

All love is dead, infected With the plague of deep disdain; Worth as nought worth rejected.

And faith, fair scorn doth gain.

From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us!

"Weep, neighbours, weep! Do you not hear it said That Love is dead?

His deathbed, peac.o.c.k's Folly; His winding-sheet is Shame; His will, False Seeming wholly; His sole executor, Blame.

From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us!

"Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead.

Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth 'Her eyes were once his dart.'

From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us!

"Alas, I lie. Rage hath this error bred, Love is not dead.

Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind: Where she his counsel keepeth Till due deserts she find.

Therefore from so vile fancy To call such wit a frenzy, Who love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us!"

The verse from the _Arcadia_ (which contains a great deal of verse) has been perhaps injuriously affected in the general judgment by the fact that it includes experiments in the impossible cla.s.sical metres. But both it and the Translations from the Psalms express the same poetical faculty employed with less directness and force. To sum up, there is no Elizabethan poet, except the two named, who is more unmistakably imbued with poetical quality than Sidney. And Hazlitt's judgment on him, that he is "jejune" and "frigid" will, as Lamb himself hinted, long remain the chiefest and most astonis.h.i.+ng example of a great critic's aberrations when his prejudices are concerned.

Had Hazlitt been criticising Thomas Watson, his judgment, though harsh, would have been not wholly easy to quarrel with. It is probably the excusable but serious error of judgment which induced his rediscoverer, Professor Arber, to rank Watson above Sidney in gifts and genius, that has led other critics to put him unduly low. Watson himself, moreover, has invited depreciation by his extreme frankness in confessing that his _Pa.s.sionate Century_ is not a record of pa.s.sion at all, but an elaborate literary _pastiche_ after this author and that. I fear it must be admitted that the average critic is not safely to be trusted with such an avowal of what he is too much disposed to advance as a charge without confession.

Watson, of whom as usual scarcely anything is known personally, was a Londoner by birth, an Oxford man by education, a friend of most of the earlier literary school of the reign, such as Lyly, Peele, and Spenser, and a tolerably industrious writer both in Latin and English during his short life, which can hardly have begun before 1557, and was certainly closed by 1593. He stands in English poetry as the author of the _Hecatompathia_ or _Pa.s.sionate Century_ of sonnets (1582), and the _Tears of Fancy_, consisting of sixty similar poems, printed after his death. The _Tears of Fancy_ are regular quatorzains, the pieces composing the _Hecatompathia_, though called sonnets, are in a curious form of eighteen lines practically composed of three six-line stanzas rhymed A B, A B, C C, and not connected by any continuance of rhyme from stanza to stanza. The special and peculiar oddity of the book is, that each sonnet has a prose preface as thus: "In this pa.s.sion the author doth very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard, which he writeth unto his mistress. He beginneth as followeth, _Plusieurs_, etc." Here is a complete example of one of Watson's pages:--

"There needeth no annotation at all before this pa.s.sion, it is of itself so plain and easily conveyed. Yet the unlearned may have this help given them by the way to know what Galaxia is or Pactolus, which perchance they have not read of often in our vulgar rhymes. Galaxia (to omit both the etymology and what the philosophers do write thereof) is a white way or milky circle in the heavens, which Ovid mentioneth in this manner--

_Est via sublimis coelo manifesta sereno,_ _Lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso._

--Metamorph. lib. 1.

And Cicero thus in Somnio Scipionis: _Erat autem is splendissimo candore inter flammas circulus elucens, quem vos (ut a Graijs accepistis) orbem lacteum nuncupatis._

Pactolus is a river in Lydia, which hath golden sands under it, as Tibullus witnesseth in this verse:--

_Nec me regna juvant, nec Lydius aurifer amnis._--Tibul. lib. 3.

Who can recount the virtues of my dear, Or say how far her fame hath taken flight, That cannot tell how many stars appear In part of heaven, which Galaxia hight, Or number all the moats in Phoebus' rays, Or golden sands whereon Pactolus plays?

And yet my hurts enforce me to confess, In crystal breast she shrouds a b.l.o.o.d.y heart, Which heart in time will make her merits less, Unless betimes she cure my deadly smart: For now my life is double dying still, And she defamed by sufferance of such ill;

And till the time she helps me as she may, Let no man undertake to tell my toil, But only such, as can distinctly say, What monsters Nilus breeds, or Afric soil: For if he do, his labour is but lost, Whilst I both fry and freeze 'twixt flame and frost."

Now this is undoubtedly, as Watson's contemporaries would have said, "a cooling card" to the reader, who is thus presented with a series of elaborate poetical exercises affecting the acutest personal feeling, and yet confessedly representing no feeling at all. Yet the _Hecatompathia_ is remarkable, both historically and intrinsically. It does not seem likely that at its publication the author can have had anything of Sidney's or much of Spenser's before him; yet his work is only less superior to the work of their common predecessors than the work of these two. By far the finest of his _Century_ is the imitation of Ferrabosco--

"Resolved to dust intombed here lieth love."

The quatorzains of the _Tears of Fancy_ are more attractive in form and less artificial in structure and phraseology, but it must be remembered that by their time Sidney's sonnets were known and Spenser had written much. The seed was scattered abroad, and it fell in congenial soil in falling on Watson, but the _Hecatompathia_ was self-sown.

This difference shows itself very remarkably in the vast outburst of sonneteering which, as has been remarked, distinguished the middle of the last decade of the sixteenth century. All these writers had Sidney and Spenser before them, and they a.s.sume so much of the character of a school that there are certain subjects, for instance, "Care-charming sleep," on which many of them (after Sidney) composed sets of rival poems, almost as definitely compet.i.tive as the sonnets of the later "Uranie et Job" and "Belle Matineuse" series in France. Nevertheless, there is in all of them--what as a rule is wanting in this kind of clique verse--the independent spirit, the original force which makes poetry. The Smiths and the Fletchers, the Griffins and the Lynches, are like little geysers round the great ones: the whole soil is instinct with fire and flame. We shall, however, take the production of the four remarkable years 1593-1596 separately, and though in more than one case we shall return upon their writers both in this chapter and in a subsequent one, the unity of the sonnet impulse seems to demand separate mention for them here.

In 1593 the influence of the Sidney poems (published, it must be remembered, in 1591) was new, and the imitators, except Watson (of whom above), display a good deal of the quality of the novice. The chief of them are Barnabe Barnes, with his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Giles Fletcher (father of the Jacobean poets, Giles and Phineas Fletcher), with his _Licia_, and Thomas Lodge, with his _Phillis_. Barnes is a modern discovery, for before Dr. Grosart reprinted him in 1875, from the unique original at Chatsworth, for thirty subscribers only (of whom I had the honour to be one), he was practically unknown. Mr. Arber has since, in his _English Garner_, opened access to a wider circle, to whom I at least do not grudge their entry. As with most of these minor Elizabethan poets, Barnes is a very obscure person. A little later than _Parthenophil_ he wrote _A Divine Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets_, having, like many of his contemporaries, an apparent desire poetically to make the best of both worlds. He also wrote a wild play in the most daring Elizabethan style, called _The Devil's Charter_, and a prose political _Treatise of Offices_.

Barnes was a friend of Gabriel Harvey's, and as such met with some rough usage from Nash, Marston, and others. His poetical worth, though there are fine pa.s.sages in _The Devil's Charter_ and in the _Divine Centurie_, must rest on _Parthenophil_. This collection consists not merely of sonnets but of madrigals, sestines, canzons, and other attempts after Italian masters.

The style, both verbal and poetical, needs chastising in places, and Barnes's expression in particular is sometimes obscure. He is sometimes comic when he wishes to be pa.s.sionate, and frequently verbose when he wishes to be expressive. But the fire, the full-bloodedness, the poetical virility, of the poems is extraordinary. A kind of intoxication of the eternal-feminine seems to have seized the poet to an extent not otherwise to be paralleled in the group, except in Sidney; while Sidney's courtly sense of measure and taste did not permit him Barnes's forcible extravagances. Here is a specimen:--

"Phoebus, rich father of eternal light, And in his hand a wreath of Heliochrise He brought, to beautify those tresses, Whose train, whose softness, and whose gloss more bright, Apollo's locks did overprize.

Thus, with this garland, whiles her brows he blesses, The golden shadow with his tincture Coloured her locks, aye gilded with the cincture."

Giles Fletcher's _Licia_ is a much more pale and colourless performance, though not wanting in merit. The author, who was afterwards a most respectable clergyman, is of the cla.s.s of _amoureux transis_, and dies for Licia throughout his poems, without apparently suspecting that it was much better to live for her. His volume contained some miscellaneous poems, with a dullish essay in the historical style (see _post_), called _The Rising of Richard to the Crown_. Very far superior is Lodge's _Phillis_, the chief poetical work of that interesting person, except some of the madrigals and odd pieces of verse scattered about his prose tracts (for which see Chapter VI.) _Phillis_ is especially remarkable for the grace and refinement with which the author elaborates the Sidneian model. Lodge, indeed, as it seems to me, was one of the not uncommon persons who can always do best with a model before them. He euphuised with better taste than Lyly, but in imitation of him; his tales in prose are more graceful than those of Greene, whom he copied; it at least seems likely that he out-Marlowed Marlowe in the rant of the _Looking-Gla.s.s for London_, and the stiffness of the _Wounds of Civil War_, and he chiefly polished Sidney in his sonnets and madrigals. It is not to be denied, however, that in three out of these four departments he gave us charming work. His mixed allegiance to Marlowe and Sidney gave him command of a splendid form of decasyllable, which appears often in _Phillis_, as for instance--

"About thy neck do all the graces throng And lay such baits as might entangle death,"

where it is worth noting that the whole beauty arises from the dexterous placing of the dissyllable "graces," and the trisyllable "entangle,"

exactly where they ought to be among the monosyllables of the rest. The madrigals "Love guards the roses of thy lips," "My Phillis hath the morning sun," and "Love in my bosom like a bee" are simply unsurpa.s.sed for sugared sweetness in English. Perhaps this is the best of them:--

"Love in my bosom like a bee, Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet.

Within mine eyes he makes his nest His bed amidst my tender breast, My kisses are his daily feast; And yet he robs me of my rest?

'Ah, wanton! will ye?'

"And if I sleep, then percheth he, With pretty flight,[26]

And makes his pillow of my knee The livelong night.

Strike I my lute, he tunes the string.

He music plays, if so I sing.

He lends me every lovely thing Yet cruel! he, my heart doth sting.

'Whist, wanton! still ye!'

"Else I with roses, every day Will whip you hence, And bind you, when you want to play, For your offence.

I'll shut my eyes to keep you in, I'll make you fast it for your sin, I'll count your power not worth a pin.

Alas, what hereby shall I win If he gainsay me?

"What if I beat the wanton boy With many a rod?

He will repay me with annoy Because a G.o.d.

Then sit thou safely on my knee, And let thy bower my bosom be.

Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee.

O Cupid! so thou pity me, Spare not, but play thee."

[26] Printed in _England's Helicon_ "sleight."

1594 was the most important of all the sonnet years, and here we are chiefly bound to mention authors who will come in for fuller notice later.

The singular book known as Willoughby's _Avisa_ which, as having a supposed bearing on Shakespere and as containing much of that personal puzzlement which rejoices critics, has had much attention of late years, is not strictly a collection of sonnets; its poems being longer and of differing stanzas. But in general character it falls in with the sonnet-collections addressed or devoted to a real or fanciful personage. It is rather satirical than panegyrical in character, and its poetical worth is very far from high. William Percy, a friend of Barnes (who dedicated the _Parthenophil_ to him), son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, and a retired person who seems to have pa.s.sed the greater part of a long life in Oxford "drinking nothing but ale," produced a very short collection ent.i.tled _Coelia_, not very noteworthy, though it contains (probably in imitation of Barnes) one of the tricky things called echo-sonnets, which, with dialogue-sonnets and the like, have sometimes amused the leisure of poets. Much more remarkable is the singular anonymous collection called _Zepheria_. Its contents are called not sonnets but canzons, though most of them are orthodox quatorzains somewhat oddly rhymed and rhythmed. It is brief, extending only to forty pieces, and, like much of the poetry of the period, begins and ends with Italian mottoes or dedication-phrases. But what is interesting about it is the evidence it gives of deep familiarity not only with Italian but with French models. This appears both in such words as "jouissance," "thesaurise," "esperance," "souvenance," "vatical"

(a thoroughly Ronsardising word), with others too many to mention, and in other characteristics. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his most valuable collection of these sonneteers, endeavours to show that this French influence was less uncommon than has sometimes been thought. Putting this aside, the characteristic of _Zepheria_ is unchastened vigour, full of promise, but decidedly in need of further schooling and discipline, as the following will show:--

"O then Desire, father of Jouissance, The Life of Love, the Death of dastard Fear, The kindest nurse to true perseverance, Mine heart inherited, with thy love's revere. [?]

Beauty! peculiar parent of Conceit, Prosperous midwife to a travelling muse, The sweet of life, Nepenthe's eyes receipt, Thee into me distilled, O sweet, infuse!

Love then (the spirit of a generous sprite, An infant ever drawing Nature's breast, The Sum of Life, that Chaos did unnight!) Dismissed mine heart from me, with thee to rest.

And now incites me cry, 'Double or quit!

Give back my heart, or take his body to it!'"

This cannot be said of the three remarkable collections yet to be noticed which appeared in this year, to wit, Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_, and Drayton's _Idea_. These three head the group and contain the best work, after Shakespere and Spenser and Sidney, in the English sonnet of the time.