A History of Elizabethan Literature

And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still.
Let this immortal life where'er it comes
Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms.
Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be
The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.
O sweet incendiary! show here thy art,
Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart;
Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combin'd against this breast at once break in,
And take away from me myself and sin;
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy pow'r of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day;
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and seal'd thee his;
By all the heavens thou hast in him,
(Fair sister of the seraphim)
By all of him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die."

The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the dead colourlessness of the beginning, and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.

He was a much younger man than either of the poets with whom we have leashed him, and his birth year used to be put at 1616, though Dr. Grosart has made it probable that it was three years earlier. His father was a stern Anglican clergyman of extremely Protestant leanings, his mother died when Crashaw was young, but his stepmother appears to have been most unnovercal. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse, and then went to Cambridge, where in 1637 he became a fellow of Peterhouse, and came in for the full tide of high church feeling, to which (under the mixed influence of Laud's policy, of the ascetic practices of the Ferrars of Gidding, and of a great architectural development afterwards defaced if not destroyed by Puritan brutality) Cambridge was even more exposed than Oxford. The outbreak of the civil war may or may not have found Crashaw at Cambridge; he was at any rate deprived of his fellowship for not taking the covenant in 1643, and driven into exile. Already inclined doctrinally and in matters of practice to the older communion, and despairing of the resurrection of the Church of England after her sufferings at the hands of the Parliament, Crashaw joined the Church of Rome, and journeyed to its metropolis. He was attached to the suit of Cardinal Pallotta, but is said to have been shocked by Italian manners. The cardinal procured him a canonry at Loretto, and this he hastened to take up, but died in 1649 with suspicions of poison, which are not impossibly, but at the same time by no means necessarily true. His poems had already appeared under the double title of Steps to the Temple (sacred), and Delights of the Muses (profane), but not under his own editorship, or it would seem with his own choice of title. Several other editions followed, – one later than his death, with curious illustrations said to be, in part at least, of his own design. Manuscript sources, as in the case of some other poets of the time, have considerably enlarged the collection since. But a great part of it consists of epigrams (in the wide sense, and almost wholly sacred) in the classical tongues, which were sometimes translated by Crashaw himself. These are not always correct in style or prosody, but are often interesting. The famous line in reference to the miracle of Cana,

"Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum,"

is assigned to Crashaw as a boy at Cambridge; of his later faculty in the same way the elaborate and, in its way, beautiful poem entitled Bulla (the Bubble) is the most remarkable.

Our chief subject, however, is the English poems proper, sacred and profane. In almost all of these there is noticeable an extraordinary inequality, the same in kind, if not in degree, as that on which we have commented in the case of The Flaming Heart. Crashaw is never quite so great as there; but he is often quite as small. His exasperating lack of self-criticism has sometimes led selectors to make a cento out of his poems – notably in the case of the exceedingly pretty "Wishes to His Unknown Mistress," beginning, "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall command my heart and me" – a poem, let it be added, which excuses this dubious process much less than most, inasmuch as nothing in it is positively bad, though it is rather too long. Here is the opening, preceded by a piece from another poem, "A Hymn to Saint Theresa": —

"Those rare works, where thou shalt leave writ
Love's noble history, with wit
Taught thee by none but him, while here
They feed our souls, shall clothe thine there
Each heavenly word by whose hid flame
Our hard hearts shall strike fire, the same
Shall flourish on thy brows and be
Both fire to us and flame to thee:
Whose light shall live bright, in thy face
By glory, in our hearts by grace.
"Thou shalt look round about, and see
Thousands of crown'd souls throng to be
Themselves thy crown, sons of thy vows:
The virgin births with which thy spouse
Made fruitful thy fair soul; go now
And with them all about thee, bow
To Him, 'Put on' (He'll say) 'put on,
My rosy love, that thy rich zone,
Sparkling with the sacred flames,
Of thousand souls whose happy names
Heaven heaps upon thy score, thy bright
Life brought them first to kiss the light
That kindled them to stars.' And so
Thou with the Lamb thy Lord shall go,
And whereso'er He sets His white
Steps, walk with Him those ways of light.
Which who in death would live to see
Must learn in life to die like thee."

"Whoe'er she be,
That not impossible she,
That shall command my heart and me;

"Where'er she lie,
Lock'd up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of destiny;

"Till that ripe birth
Of studied Fate stand forth,
And teach her fair steps to our earth:

"Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:

"Meet you her, my wishes
Bespeak her to my blisses,
And be ye call'd, my absent kisses."

The first hymn to Saint Theresa, to which The Flaming Heart is a kind of appendix, was written when Crashaw was still an Anglican (for which he did not fail, later, to make a characteristic and very pretty, though quite unnecessary, apology). It has no passage quite up to the Invocation – Epiphonema, to give it the technical term – of the later poem. But it is, on the contrary, good almost throughout, and is, for uniform exaltation, far the best of Crashaw's poems. Yet such uniform exaltation must be seldom sought in him. It is in his little bursts, such as that in the stanza beginning, "O mother turtle dove," that his charm consists. Often, as in verse after verse of The Weeper, it has an unearthly delicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has ever equalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casual and unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of diction which the greatest lyric poets since – Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne – have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneously recovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The very maddest and most methodless of the "Metaphysicals" cannot touch Crashaw in his tasteless use of conceits. When he, in The Weeper just above referred to, calls the tears of Magdalene "Wat'ry brothers," and "Simpering sons of those fair eyes," and when, in the most intolerable of all the poet's excesses, the same eyes are called "Two waking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans," which follow our Lord about the hills of Galilee, it is almost difficult to know whether to feel most contempt or indignation for a man who could so write. It is fair to say that there are various readings and omissions in the different editions which affect both these passages. Yet the offence is that Crashaw should ever have written them at all. Amends, however, are sure to be made before the reader has read much farther. Crashaw's longest poems – a version of Marini's Sospetto d'Herode, and one of the rather overpraised "Lover and Nightingale" story of Strada – are not his best; the metre in which both are written, though the poet manages it well, lacks the extraordinary charm of his lyric measures. It does not appear that the "Not impossible she" ever made her appearance, and probably for a full half of his short life Crashaw burnt only with religious fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as he has, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred and profane, has dropped such notes of ethereal music. At his best he is far above singing, at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is never coarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull; and everywhere he makes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry. Mr. Pope, who borrowed not a little from him, thought, indeed, that you could find nothing of "The real part of poetry" (correct construction and so forth) in Crashaw; and Mr. Hayley gently rebukes Cowley (after observing that if Pope borrowed from Crashaw, it was "as the sun borrows from the earth") for his "glowing panegyrick." Now, if the real part of poetry is anywhere in Hayley, or quintessentially in Pope, it certainly is not in Crashaw.

The group or school (for it is not easy to decide on either word, and objections might be taken to each) at the head of which Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw must be placed, and which included Herbert and his band of sacred singers, included also not a few minor groups, sufficiently different from each other, but all marked off sharply from the innovating and classical school of Waller and his followers, which it is not proposed to treat in this volume. All, without exception, show the influence in different ways of Ben Jonson and of Donne. But each has its own peculiarity. We find these peculiarities, together with anticipations of post-Reformation characteristics, mixed very curiously in the miscellanies of the time. These are interesting enough, and may be studied with advantage, if not also with pleasure, in the principal of them, Wit's Recreations (1640). This, with certain kindred works (Wit Restored, and the very unsavoury Musarum Deliciæ of Sir John Mennis and Dr. Smith), has been more than once republished. In these curious collections, to mention only one instance, numerous pieces of Herrick's appeared with considerable variants from the text of the Hesperides; and in their pages things old and new, charming pastoral poems, vers de société of very unequal merit, ballads, satires, epigrams, and a large quantity of mere scatology and doggerel, are heaped together pell-mell. Songs from the dramatists, especially Fletcher, make their appearance, sometimes with slight variants, and there are forms of the drinking song in Gammer Gurton's Needle long after, and of Sir John Suckling's "Ballad on a Wedding," apparently somewhat before, their respective publication in their proper places. Here is the joke about the wife and the almanack which reckless tradition has told of Dryden; printed when Lady Elizabeth Howard was in the nursery, and Dryden was not yet at Westminster. Here we learn how, probably about the second or third decade of the century, the favourite authors of learned ladies were "Wither, Draiton, and Balzack" (Guez de Balzac of the Letters), a very singular trio; and how some at least loved the "easy ambling" of Heywood's prose, but thought that he "grovelled on the stage," which it must be confessed he not uncommonly did. Wit Restored contains the charming "Phillida flouts Me," with other real "delights." Even Milton makes his appearance in these collections, which continued to be popular for more than a century, and acquired at intervals fresh vogue from the great names of Dryden and Pope.

Neglecting or returning from these, we may class the minor Caroline poets under the following heads. There are belated Elizabethans like Habington, sacred poets of the school of Herbert, translators like Stanley, Sherburne, and Quarles, philosophico-theological poets like Joseph Beaumont and More, and poets of society, such as Lovelace and Suckling, whose class degenerated into a class of boon companion song-writers, such as Alexander Brome, and, at the extremity of our present period, Charles Cotton, in whose verse (as for the matter of that in the famous muses of Lovelace and Suckling themselves) the rapidly degenerating prosody of the time is sometimes painfully evident. This is also apparent (though it is compensated by much exquisite poetry, and on the strictly lyric side rarely offends) in the work of Randolph, Corbet, Cartwright, Chamberlayne of the Pharonnida, Sidney Godolphin, Shakerley Marmion, Cleveland, Benlowes, Kynaston, John Hall, the enigmatic Chalkhill, Patrick Carey, Bishop King. These about exhaust the list of poets who must be characterised here, though it could be extended. Cowley, Marvell, and Waller fall outside our limits.

George Herbert, the one popular name, if we except Lovelace and Suckling, of the last paragraph, was born at Montgomery Castle in 1593, of the great house now represented in the English peerage by the holders of the titles of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Powis. George was the younger brother of the equally well-known Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and after being for some years public orator at Cambridge, turned, it is said, on some despite or disappointment, from secular to sacred business, accepted the living of Bemerton, and, after holding it for a short time, died in 1633. Walton's Life was hardly needed to fix Herbert in the popular mind, for his famous volume of sacred poems, The Temple, would have done so, and has done so far more firmly. It was not his only book by any means; he had displayed much wit as quite a boy in counter-lampooning Andrew Melville's ponderous and impudent Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria, an attack on the English universities; and afterwards he wrote freely in Greek, Latin, and English, both in prose and verse. Nothing, however, but The Temple has held popular estimation, and that has held it firmly, being as much helped by the Tractarian as by the Romantic movement. It may be confessed without shame and without innuendo that Herbert has been on the whole a greater favourite with readers than with critics, and the reason is obvious. He is not prodigal of the finest strokes of poetry. To take only his own contemporaries, and undoubtedly pupils, his gentle moralising and devotion are tame and cold beside the burning glow of Crashaw, commonplace and popular beside the intellectual subtlety and, now and then, the inspired touch of Vaughan. But he never drops into the flatness and the extravagance of both these writers, and his beauties, assuredly not mean in themselves, and very constantly present, are both in kind and in arrangement admirably suited to the average comprehension. He is quaint and conceited; but his quaintnesses and conceits are never beyond the reach of any tolerably intelligent understanding. He is devout, but his devotion does not transgress into the more fantastic regions of piety. He is a mystic, but of the more exoteric school of mysticism. He expresses common needs, common thoughts, the everyday emotions of the Christian, just sublimated sufficiently to make them attractive. The fashion and his own taste gave him a pleasing quaintness, which his good sense kept from being ever obscure or offensive or extravagant. The famous "Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," and many short passages which are known to every one, express Herbert perfectly. The thought is obvious, usual, in no sense far fetched. The morality is plain and simple. The expression, with a sufficient touch of the daintiness of the time, has nothing that is extraordinarily or ravishingly felicitous whether in phrasing or versing. He is, in short, a poet whom all must respect; whom those that are in sympathy with his vein of thought cannot but revere; who did England an inestimable service, by giving to the highest and purest thoughts that familiar and abiding poetic garb which contributes so much to fix any thoughts in the mind, and of which, to tell the truth, poetry has been much more prodigal to other departments of thought by no means so well deserving. But it is impossible to call him a great poet even in his own difficult class. The early Latin hymn writers are there to show what a great religious poet must be like. Crashaw, if his genius had been less irregular and jaculative, might have been such. Herbert is not, and could not have been. With him it is an almost invariable custom to class Vaughan the "Silurist," and a common one to unite George Sandys, the traveller, translator of Ovid, and paraphrast of the Psalms and other parts of the Bible. Sandys, an older man than Herbert by fifteen, and than Vaughan by more than forty years, published rather late, so that he came as a sacred poet after Herbert, and not long before Vaughan. He was son of the Archbishop of York, and brother of that Edwin Sandys who was a pupil of Hooker, and who is said to have been present on the melancholy occasion when the judicious one was "called to rock the cradle." He is interesting for a singular and early mastery of the couplet, which the following extract will show: —

"O Thou, who all things hast of nothing made,
Whose hand the radiant firmament displayed,
With such an undiscerned swiftness hurled