A History of Elizabethan Literature

"We saw and woo'd each other's eyes,My soul contracted then with thine,And both burnt in one sacrifice,By which our marriage grew divine."Let wilder youths, whose soul is sense,Profane the temple of delight,And purchase endless penitence,With the stolen pleasure of one night."Time's ever ours, while we despiseThe sensual idol of our clay,For though the sun do set and rise,We joy one everlasting day."Whose light no jealous clouds obscure,While each of us shine innocent,The troubled stream is still impure;With virtue flies away content."And though opinions often err,We'll court the modest smile of fame,For sin's black danger circles her,Who hath infection in her name."Thus when to one dark silent roomDeath shall our loving coffins thrust:Fame will build columns on our tomb,And add a perfume to our dust."

But Castara is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly charge on English literature as a whole – a foolish and almost canting prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' heads until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any one doubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless critic might connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more than orthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besides contributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, is invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism which is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it not been for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in a very strange fashion.

There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group – it would hardly be fair to call them a school – of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention has been paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merely to Davenant's Gondibert and Cowley's Davideis, but to Paradise Lost itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts of the Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tasso himself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic with something and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here by the work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill, the author of Thealma and Clearchus, was, with his work, introduced to the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of charming description and some very poetical phrase.

Much the same may be said of the Cupid and Psyche (1637) of the dramatist Shakerley Marmion (v. inf.), which follows the original of Apuleius with alternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is most original. The Leoline and Sydanis (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is not in couplets but in rhyme royal – a metre of which the author was so fond that he even translated the Troilus and Cressida of Chaucer into Latin, retaining the seven-line stanza and its rhymes. Kynaston, who was a member of both universities and at one time proctor at Cambridge, was a man interested in various kinds of learning, and even started an Academy or Museum Minervæ of his own. In Leoline and Sydanis he sometimes comes near to the mock heroic, but in his lyrics called Cynthiades he comes nearer still to the best Caroline cry. One or two of his pieces have found their way into anthologies, but until the present writer reprinted his works59 he was almost unknown.

The most important by far, however, of this group is William Chamberlayne, a physician of Shaftesbury, who, before or during the Civil War, began and afterwards finished (publishing it in 1659) the very long heroic romance of Pharonnida, a story of the most involved and confused character but with episodes of great vividness and even sustained power: a piece of versification straining the liberties of enjambement in line and want of connection in syntax to the utmost; but a very mine of poetical expression and imagery. Jewels are to be picked up on every page by those who will take the trouble to do so, and who are not offended by the extraordinary nonchalance of the composition.

The Theophila of Edward Benlowes (1603? -1676) was printed in 1652 with elaborate and numerous engravings by Hollar, which have made it rare, and usually imperfect when met with. Benlowes was a Cambridge man (of St. John's College) by education, but lived latterly and died at Oxford, having been reduced from wealth to poverty by the liberality which made his friends anagrammatise his name into "Benevolus." His work was abused as an awful example of the extravagant style by Butler (Character of a Small Poet), and by Warburton in the next century; but it was never reprinted till the date of the collection just noted. It is a really curious book, displaying the extraordinary diffusion of poetical spirit still existing, but in a hectic and decadent condition. Benlowes – a Cleveland with more poetry and less cleverness, or a very much weaker Crashaw – uses a monorhymed triplet made up of a heroic, an octosyllable, and an Alexandrine which is as wilfully odd as the rest of him.

Randolph, the youngest and not the least gifted of the tribe of Ben, died before he was thirty, after writing some noteworthy plays, and a certain number of minor poems, which, as it has been well observed, rather show that he might have done anything, than that he did actually do something. Corbet was Bishop first of Oxford and then of Norwich, and died in 1635. Corbet's work is of that peculiar class which is usually, though not always, due to "University Wits," and which only appeals to people with a considerable appreciation of humour, and a large stock of general information. It is always occasional in character, and rarely succeeds so well as when the treatment is one of distinct persiflage. Thus the elegy on Donne is infinitely inferior to Carew's, and the mortuary epitaph on Arabella Stuart is, for such a subject and from the pen of a man of great talent, extraordinarily feeble. The burlesque epistle to Lord Mordaunt on his journey to the North is great fun, and the "Journey into France," though, to borrow one of its own jokes, rather "strong," is as good. The "Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond," a ferocious satire on the Puritans, distinguishes itself from almost all precedent work of the kind by the force and directness of its attack, which almost anticipates Dryden. And Corbet had both pathetic and imaginative touches on occasion, as here: —

"What I shall leave thee none can tell,But all shall say I wish thee well,I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth,Both bodily and ghostly health;Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee,So much of either may undo thee.I wish thee learning, not for show,Enough for to instruct and know;Not such as gentlemen requireTo prate at table, or at fire.I wish thee all thy mother's graces,Thy father's fortunes, and his places.I wish thee friends, and one at court,Not to build on, but supportTo keep thee, not in doing manyOppressions, but from suffering any.I wish thee peace in all thy ways,Nor lazy nor contentious days;And when thy soul and body partAs innocent as now those art."

Cartwright, a short-lived man but a hard student, shows best in his dramas. In his occasional poems, strongly influenced by Donne, he is best at panegyric, worst at burlesque and epigram. In "On a Gentlewoman's Silk Hood" and some other pieces he may challenge comparison with the most futile of the metaphysicals; but no one who has read his noble elegy on Sir Bevil Grenvil, unequal as it is, will think lightly of Cartwright. Sir Edward Sherburne was chiefly a translator in the fashionable style. His original poems were those of a very inferior Carew (he even copies the name Celia), but they are often pretty. Alexander Brome, of whom very little is known, and who must not be confounded with the dramatist, was a lawyer and a cavalier song-writer, who too frequently wrote mere doggerel; but on the other hand, he sometimes did not, and when he escaped the evil influence, as in the stanzas "Come, come, let us drink," "The Trooper," and not a few others, he has the right anacreontic vein.

As for Charles Cotton, his "Virgil Travesty" is deader than Scarron's, and deserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every one in the essay on "New Year's Day" are the best thing he did. But there are many excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint of the mere coarseness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though he was also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody which distinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was one of the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms and write rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been a little undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose.

Thomas Stanley has been classed above as a translator because he would probably have liked to have his scholarship thus brought into prominence. It was, both in ancient and modern tongues, very considerable. His History of Philosophy was a classic for a very long time; and his edition of Æschylus had the honour of revision within the nineteenth century by Porson and by Butler. It is not certain that Bentley did not borrow from him; and his versions of Anacreon, of various other Greek lyrists, of the later Latins, and of modern writers in Spanish and Italian are most remarkable. But he was also an original poet in the best Caroline style of lyric; and his combination of family (for he was of the great Stanley stock), learning, and genius gave him a high position with men of letters of his day. Sidney Godolphin, who died very young fighting for the King in Hopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificently celebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragments of his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known. None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time, and very little later; while the MSS. are not in very accomplished form, and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, of Godolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the Fourth Æneid has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precocious poet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on the other side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barely twenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, Horæ Vacivæ, of prose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side, and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixed kinds – sacred and profane, serious and comic – and the best of them, such as "The Call" and "The Lure," have a slender but most attractive vein of fantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famous Lord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert to the Church of England, left manuscript pieces, human and divine, which were printed by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; while Bishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me no more how fair she is," never falls below a level much above the average. The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and exist in numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard to disentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy and quotations in Johnson's Life of Cowley. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thought and phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he does not often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those who have been mentioned. A few examples of this class may be given: —

"Through a lowDark vale, where shade-affecting walks did growEternal strangers to the sun, did lieThe narrow path frequented only byThe forest tyrants when they bore their preyFrom open dangers of discovering day.Passed through this desert valley, they were nowClimbing an easy hill, whose every boughMaintained a feathered chorister to singSoft panegyrics, and the rude winds bringInto a murmuring slumber; whilst the calmMorn on each leaf did hang the liquid balmWith an intent, before the next sun's birthTo drop it in those wounds which the cleft earthReceived from's last day's beams. The hill's ascentWound up by action, in a large extentOf leafy plains, shows them the canopyBeneath whose shadow their large way did lie."Chamberlayne, Pharonnida, iv. 1. 199-216.

It will be observed that of these eighteen lines all but four are overrun; and the resemblance to the couplet of Keats's Endymion should not be missed.

"April is past, then do not shed,And do not waste in vain,Upon thy mother's earthy bedThy tears of silver rain."Thou canst not hope that the cold earthBy wat'ring will bring forthA flower like thee, or will give birthTo one of the like worth."'Tis true the rain fall'n from the skyOr from the clouded air,Doth make the earth to fructify,Ann makes the heaven more fair."With thy dear face it is not so,Which, if once overcast,If thou rain down thy showers of woe,They, like the sirens, blast."Therefore, when sorrow shall becloudThy fair serenest day,Weep not: thy sighs shall be allow'dTo chase the storm away."Consider that the teeming vine,If cut by chance [it] weep,Doth bear no grapes to make the wine,But feels eternal sleep."KYNASTON."Be conquer'd by such charms; there shallNot always such enticements fall.What know we whether that rich spring of lightWill staunch his streamsOf golden beamsEre the approach of night?"How know we whether't shall not beThe last to either thee or me?He can at will his ancient brightness gain,But thou and IWhen we shall dieShall still in dust remain."JOHN HALL.

This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They stand more by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history, marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great measure – some think out of all measure – in poetry. In the best of them there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the amatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalue it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my thinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical pleasures as any classic or any mediævalist; but they have what no classic except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had, – the fine rapture, the passing but transforming madness which brings merely physical passion sub specie æternitatis; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that analytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the chivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker moods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the physical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) always blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them – that the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will read Carew's Rapture, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with Adam in Paradise Lost, I should like to ask him on which side, according to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself no hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the author of Tetrachordon, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the lines to "A. L."

There are other matters to be considered in the determination of the critical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been rather odd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restoration threw on all works of "the last age," and which deepened as the school of Dryden passed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowley tradition were first exhumed for the purposes of post-mortem examination by and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member of the class. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend the Metaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnson against the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in his generalisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and used by Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by any one who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologically and by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. Still Johnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who have very little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity of expression as if it had been a deliberate substitution of alloy for gold. The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves to any one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation than Johnson's training and associations enabled him to apply; and even the worst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, that of "making the common as though it were not common." Towards the end of the eighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revived with taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it so happened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder and more irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaint but less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose writers like Burton, Browne, and Taylor, or to the massive splendours of the Elizabethan poets proper. The poetry of the Caroline age was, therefore, a little slurred, and this mishap of falling between two schools has constantly recurred to it. Some critics even who have done its separate authors justice, have subsequently indulged in palinodes, have talked about decadence and Alexandrianism and what not. The majority have simply let the Cavalier Poets (as they are sometimes termed by a mere historical coincidence) be something more than the victims of the schools that preceded and followed them. The lovers of the school of good sense which Waller founded regard the poets of this chapter as extravagant concettists; the lovers of the Elizabethan school proper regard them as effeminate triflers. One of Milton's gorgeous but constantly illogical phrases about the poets of his day may perhaps have created a prejudice against these poets. But Milton was a politician as well as a poet, a fanatic as well as a man of letters of seldom equalled, and never, save in two or three cases, surpassed powers. He was also a man of a more morose and unamiable private character than any other great poet the world has known except Racine. The easy bonhomie of the Caroline muse repelled his austerity; its careless good-breeding shocked his middle-class and Puritan Philistinism; its laxity revolted his principles of morality. Not improbably the vein of sympathy which discovers itself in the exquisite verse of the Comus, of the Allegro and Penseroso, of Lycidas itself, infuriated him (as such veins of sympathy when they are rudely checked and turned from their course will often do) with those who indulged instead of checking it. But because Lycidas is magnificent, and Il Penseroso charming poetry, we are not to think meanly of "Fair Daffodils," or "Ask me no more," of "Going to the Wars," or "Tell me no more how fair she is."

Let us clear our minds of this cant, and once more admit, as the student of literature always has to remind himself, that a sapphire and diamond ring is not less beautiful because it is not a marble palace, or a bank of wild flowers in a wood because it is not a garden after the fashion of Lenôtre. In the division of English poetry which we have been reviewing, there are to be found some of the most exquisite examples of the gem and flower order of beauty that can be found in all literature. When Herrick bids Perilla

"Wind me in that very sheetWhich wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst imploreThe gods' protection but the night before:Follow me weeping to my turf, and thereLet fall a primrose and with it a tear;Then lastly, let some weekly strewings beDevoted to the memory of me.Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keepStill in the cool and silent shades of sleep;"

or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style —

"In this world, the Isle of Dreams,While we sit by sorrow's streams,Tears and terrors are our themes;"

when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to, of which he has almost the secret, cries

"Oh, love me then, and now begin it,Let us not lose this present minute;For time and age will work that wrackWhich time nor age shall ne'er call back;"

when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in this splendid sally —

"So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea,A star about the Arctic circle mayThan ours yield clearer light; yet that but shallServe at the frozen pilot's funeral:"

when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks, – the fire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most careless and unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into those perfect verses which hardly even Burns and Shelley have equalled since, – it is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatest poets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so often cause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicity of language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem so easy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of a sensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the loftiest spirituality.

When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found to be based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-driven metaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period of literature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, they are said to be "decadence," "autumn," "over-ripe fruit," "sunset," and so forth. These pretty analogies have done much harm in literary history. Of the Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata non perde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna." If there is any meaning about the phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the idea of approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, in literature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction. An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (very properly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. But literature is not short-lived. There was no sign of poetry dying when Shelley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakespere lived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthology or of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods of difference. There are no periods of decay in literature so long as anything good is produced; and when nothing good is produced, it is only a sign that the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much that was good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. What is more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, some of which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover of poetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of all the great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. For the unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, for Dante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poets we have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrick and Milton's earlier poems; between the Caroline poets, major and minor, as just reviewed on the one hand, and The Faërie Queene on the other. But I certainly would give Paradise Regained for some score of poems of the writers just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a few passages (I would not give those) of Paradise Lost. And, as I have endeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparative estimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon to weigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, and in an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that even of the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his own kind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard of most of the poets just surveyed, both these questions can be answered with an unhesitating affirmative. If we had not these poets, one particular savour, one particular form, of the poetical rapture would be lacking to the poetical expert; just as if what Herrick himself calls "the brave Burgundian wine" were not, no amount of claret and champagne could replace it. For passionate sense of the good things of earth, and at the same time for mystical feeling of their insecurity, for exquisite style without the frigidity and the over-correctness which the more deliberate stylists frequently display, for a blending of Nature and art that seems as if it must have been as simply instinctive in all as it certainly was in some, the poets of the Tribe of Ben, of the Tribe of Donne, who illustrated the period before Puritanism and Republicanism combined had changed England from merriment to sadness, stand alone in letters. We have had as good since, but never the same – never any such blending of classical frankness, of mediæval simplicity and chivalry, of modern reflection and thought.60