A History of Elizabethan Literature

"Fair stood the wind for France,"

is quite at the head of its own class of verse in England – Campbell's two masterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "Six Hundred," falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short of it. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and the skill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogether beyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see ante) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and such elaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his great qualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous Polyolbion, written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any in English – the Alexandrine – crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obliging the author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superadded ornament, in elaborately patched-on passages, than in the actual and natural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another than the mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative passage: —

"The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise,(As they who only sought ambitiously to raiseThe blood of God-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear:And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air(Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make)Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take,That any petty hill upon the English side,Should dare, not (with a crouch) to veil unto their pride.When Wrekin, as a hill his proper worth that knew,And understood from whence their insolency grew,For all that they appear'd so terrible in sight,Yet would not once forego a jot that was his right,And when they star'd on him, to them the like he gave,And answer'd glance for glance, and brave for brave:That, when some other hills which English dwellers were,The lusty Wrekin saw himself so well to bearAgainst the Cambrian part, respectless of their power;His eminent disgrace expecting every hourThose flatterers that before (with many cheerful look)Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook,And muffled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black,Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack:That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear(Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear;He, having none but them, they having none but heWhich to their mutual joy might either's object be)Within their secret breast conceivèd sundry fears,And as they mix'd their streams, for him so mix'd their tears.Whom, in their coming down, when plainly he discerns,For them his nobler heart in his strong bosom yearns:But, constantly resolv'd, that dearer if they wereThe Britons should not yet all from the English bear;'Therefore,' quoth he, 'brave flood, tho' forth by Cambria brought,Yet as fair England's friend, or mine thou would'st be thought(O Severn) let thine ear my just defence partake.'"

Happy phrases abound, and, moreover, every now and then there are set pieces, as they may be called, of fanciful description which are full of beauty; for Drayton (a not very usual thing in a man of such unflagging industry, and even excellence of work) was full of fancy. The fairy poem of Nymphidia is one of the most graceful trifles in the language, possessing a dancing movement and a felicitous choice of imagery and language which triumphantly avoid the trivial on the one hand, and the obviously burlesque on the other. The singular satirical or quasi-satirical poems of The Mooncalf, The Owl, and The Man in the Moon, show a faculty of comic treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics called Odes (of which the Ballad of Agincourt is sometimes classed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge Polyolbion, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist of three divisions —The Barons' Wars in eight-lined stanzas, the Heroic Epistles (suggested, of course, by Ovid, though anything but Ovidian) in heroic couplets, The Miseries of Queen Margaret in the same stanza as The Barons' Wars, and Four Legends in stanzas of various form and range. That this mass of work should possess, or should, indeed, admit of the charms of poetry which distinguish The Faërie Queene would be impossible, even if Drayton had been Spenser, which he was far from being. But to speak of his "dull creeping narrative," to accuse him of the "coarsest vulgarities," of being "flat and prosaic," and so on, as was done by eighteenth-century critics, is absolutely uncritical, unless it be very much limited. The Barons' Wars is somewhat dull, the author being too careful to give a minute history of a not particularly interesting subject, and neglecting to take the only possible means of making it interesting by bringing out strongly the characters of heroes and heroines, and so infusing a dramatic interest. But this absence of character is a constant drawback to the historical poems of the time. And even here we find many passages where the drawback of the stanza for narrative is most skilfully avoided, and where the vigour of the single lines and phrases is unquestionable on any sound estimate.

Still the stanza, though Drayton himself defends it (it should be mentioned that his prose prefaces are excellent, and constitute another link between him and Dryden), is something of a clog; and the same thing is felt in The Miseries of Queen Margaret and the Legends, where, however, it is again not difficult to pick out beauties. The Heroical Epistles can be praised with less allowance. Their shorter compass, their more manageable metre (for Drayton was a considerable master of the earlier form of couplet), and the fact that a personal interest is infused in each, give them a great advantage; and, as always, passages of great merit are not infrequent. Finally, Drayton must have the praise (surely not quite irrelevant) of a most ardent and lofty spirit of patriotism. Never was there a better Englishman, and as his love of his country spirited him up to the brilliant effort of the Ballad of Agincourt, so it sustained him through the "strange herculean task" of the Polyolbion, and often put light and life into the otherwise lifeless mass of the historic poems. Yet I have myself no doubt that these historic poems were a mistake, and that their composition, though prompted by a most creditable motive, the burning attachment to England which won the fight with Spain, and laid the foundation of the English empire, was not altogether, perhaps was not by any means, according to knowledge.

The almost invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idle controversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in the case of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made in his own Virgidemiarum—

"Follow me who list,And be the second English satirist."

It has been pleaded in Hall's favour that although the date of publication of his Satires is known, the date of their composition is not known. It is not even necessary to resort to this kind of special pleading; for nothing can be more evident than that the bravado is not very serious. On the literal supposition, however, and if we are to suppose that publication immediately followed composition, Hall was anticipated by more than one or two predecessors, in the production of work not only specifically satirical but actually called satire, and by two at least in the adoption of the heroic couplet form which has ever since been consecrated to the subject. Satirical poetry, of a kind, is of course nearly if not quite as old as the language, and in the hands of Skelton it had assumed various forms. But the satire proper – the following of the great Roman examples of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius in general lashing of vice and folly – can hardly trace itself further back in England than George Gascoigne's Steel Glass, which preceded Hall's Virgidemiarum by twenty years, and is interesting not only for itself but as being ushered in by the earliest known verses of Walter Raleigh. It is written in blank verse, and is a rather rambling commentary on the text vanitas vanitatum, but it expressly calls itself a satire and answers sufficiently well to the description. More immediate and nearer examples were to be found in the Satires of Donne and Lodge. The first named were indeed, like the other poetical works of their marvellously gifted writer, not published till many years after; but universal tradition ascribes the whole of Donne's profane poems to his early youth, and one document exists which distinctly dates "John Donne, his Satires," as early as 1593. We shall therefore deal with them, as with the other closely connected work of their author, here and in this chapter. But there has to be mentioned first the feebler but chronologically more certain work of Thomas Lodge, A Fig for Momus, which fulfils both the requirements of known date and of composition in couplets. It appeared in 1595, two years before Hall, and is of the latest and weakest of Lodge's verse work. It was written or at least produced when he was just abandoning his literary and adventurous career and settling down as a quiet physician with no more wild oats to sow, except, perhaps, some participation in popish conspiracy. The style did not lend itself to the display of any of Lodge's strongest gifts – romantic fancy, tenderness and sweetness of feeling, or elaborate embroidery of precious language. He follows Horace pretty closely and with no particular vigour. Nor does the book appear to have attracted much attention, so that it is just possible that Hall may not have heard of it. If, however, he had not, it is certainly a curious coincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on the couplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried. For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively brief space of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturally accompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in so many ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly be any more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which these writers, especially Donne and Marston, took to give individuality and "bite" to their work was as faulty as it now seems to us peculiar.

Ben Jonson, the least gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said of John Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," and I own that without going through the long catalogue of singularly contradictory criticisms which have been passed on Donne, I feel disposed to fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium. Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but that does not matter. It is sufficient for me that in one special point of the poetic charm – the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by a flood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capable imagination – Donne is surpassed by no poet of any language, and equalled by few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highest poetry with the lowest doggerel, the noblest thought with the most trivial crotchet – all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it only chequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts and graces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets, although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlier than 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappeared wholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence of no poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towards his own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, except that of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as

"A king who ruled as he thought fitThe universal monarchy of wit,"

expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headed by Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in the same monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet" (that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifying which Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of the nation."

His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, in the earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at both universities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, a law-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the Roman Church, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced some religious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean of St. Paul's, and died in 1631.

It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition of most, and that all but certain documentary evidence points to the composition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unless the date of the Harleian MS. is a forgery, some of his satires were written in or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling passion, without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would also incline us to assign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, and many of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and more reflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatory character of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. All alike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality – the fiery imagination shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy thoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has a peculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture of voluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought from the marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of French Renaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English. The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of the discovery of

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone"

of his own long interred skeleton: the wish —

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghostWho died before the god of love was born,"

and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpected places, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. In some of his poems, as the Anatomy of the World, occasioned by the death of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (only touches here) of the passion which had distinguished the author earlier (for the Anatomy is not an early work), and with religious and philosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam – shot through, however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry. Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. And the three following pieces, the "Dream," a fragment of satire, and an extract from the Anatomy, may or may not, according to taste, supply it: —

"Dear love, for nothing less than theeWould I have broke this happy dream.It was a themeFor reason, much too strong for fantasy:Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yetMy dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it:Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee sufficeTo make dreams true, and fables histories;Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it bestNot to dream all my dream, let's act the rest."As lightning or a taper's lightThine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me;Yet I thought thee(For thou lov'st truth) an angel at first sight,But when I saw thou saw'st my heartAnd knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st whenExcess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then;I must confess, it could not choose but beProfane to think thee anything but thee."Coming and staying show'd thee thee,But rising makes me doubt that nowThou art not thou.That love is weak where fears are strong as he;'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave,If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have.Perchance as torches which must ready beMen light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me.Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then IWill dream that hope again, or else would die.""O age of rusty iron! some better witCall it some worse name, if ought equal it.Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: nowInjustice is sold dearer far; allowAll claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anonThe money, which you sweat and swear for's goneInto other hands; so controverted lands'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands.If law be in the judge's heart, and heHave no heart to resist letter or fee,Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts belowFlows from the first main head, and these can throwThee, if they suck thee in, to misery,To fetters, halters. But if th' injurySteel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'stAgainst the stream upwards when thou art mostHeavy and most faint; and in these labours they'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy wayBecome great seas, o'er which when thou shalt beForc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt seeThat all thy gold was drowned in them before.""She, whose fair body no such prison wasBut that a soul might well be pleased to passAn age in her; she, whose rich beauty lentMintage to other beauties, for they wentBut for so much as they were like to her;She, in whose body (if we dare preferThis low world to so high a mark as she),The western treasure, eastern spicery,Europe and Afric, and the unknown restWere easily found, or what in them was best;And when we've made this large discoveryOf all, in her some one part then will beTwenty such parts, whose plenty and riches isEnough to make twenty such worlds as this;She, whom had they known, who did first betrothThe tutelar angels and assigned one bothTo nations, cities, and to companies,To functions, offices, and dignities,And to each several man, to him and him,They would have giv'n her one for every limb;She, of whose soul if we may say 'twas gold,Her body was th' electrum and did holdMany degrees of that; we understoodHer by her sight; her pure and eloquent bloodSpoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wroughtThat one might almost say, her body thought;She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is goneAnd chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl uponOur prison's prison earth, nor think us wellLonger than whilst we bear our brittle shell."

But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a full anthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of English literature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry," though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedly glaring faults.

Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other hand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere better shown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their just admiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, instead of going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature, merely give us fresh studies of Ibam forte via sacra or the Tenth of Juvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne is not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the Transformed Metamorphosis of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients intended the Satura to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure of all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (as far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire. At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian lengthening of the mute e; at another the writer seems to be emulating Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.

These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess, to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest writer of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the most sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed by their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argues either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoble simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed over in any account of it.

Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeoman rank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel at Cambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living of Hawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich, of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and, not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburb of his cathedral city. His later life was important for religious literature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter of which he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger and greater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his early Cambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They have on the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matter and the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time to some extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, is the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral indignation. Indeed the want of sincerity – the evidence of the literary exercise – injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We do not, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist – a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one may be given: —