A History of the French Novel. Volume 1. From the Beginning to 1800

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 fit
The 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 ghost
Who 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 thee
Would I have broke this happy dream.
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy:
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it:
Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams true, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

"As lightning or a taper's light
Thine 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 heart
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then;
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane to think thee anything but thee.

"Coming and staying show'd thee thee,
But rising makes me doubt that now
Thou 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 be
Men light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me.
Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then I
Will dream that hope again, or else would die."

"O age of rusty iron! some better wit
Call it some worse name, if ought equal it.
Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: now
Injustice is sold dearer far; allow
All claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anon
The money, which you sweat and swear for's gone
Into other hands; so controverted lands
'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands.
If law be in the judge's heart, and he
Have no heart to resist letter or fee,
Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts below
Flows from the first main head, and these can throw
Thee, if they suck thee in, to misery,
To fetters, halters. But if th' injury
Steel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'st
Against the stream upwards when thou art most
Heavy and most faint; and in these labours they
'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy way
Become great seas, o'er which when thou shalt be
Forc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt see
That all thy gold was drowned in them before."

"She, whose fair body no such prison was
But that a soul might well be pleased to pass
An age in her; she, whose rich beauty lent
Mintage to other beauties, for they went
But for so much as they were like to her;
She, in whose body (if we dare prefer
This low world to so high a mark as she),
The western treasure, eastern spicery,
Europe and Afric, and the unknown rest
Were easily found, or what in them was best;
And when we've made this large discovery
Of all, in her some one part then will be
Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is
Enough to make twenty such worlds as this;
She, whom had they known, who did first betroth
The tutelar angels and assigned one both
To 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 hold
Many degrees of that; we understood