A History of Elizabethan Literature

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 low
Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow
Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie
The narrow path frequented only by
The forest tyrants when they bore their prey
From open dangers of discovering day.
Passed through this desert valley, they were now
Climbing an easy hill, whose every bough
Maintained a feathered chorister to sing
Soft panegyrics, and the rude winds bring
Into a murmuring slumber; whilst the calm
Morn on each leaf did hang the liquid balm
With an intent, before the next sun's birth
To drop it in those wounds which the cleft earth
Received from's last day's beams. The hill's ascent
Wound up by action, in a large extent
Of leafy plains, shows them the canopy
Beneath 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 bed
Thy tears of silver rain.

"Thou canst not hope that the cold earth
By wat'ring will bring forth
A flower like thee, or will give birth
To one of the like worth.

"'Tis true the rain fall'n from the sky
Or 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 becloud
Thy fair serenest day,
Weep not: thy sighs shall be allow'd
To 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 shall
Not always such enticements fall.
What know we whether that rich spring of light
Will staunch his streams
Of golden beams
Ere the approach of night?

"How know we whether't shall not be
The last to either thee or me?
He can at will his ancient brightness gain,
But thou and I
When we shall die
Shall 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 sheet
Which wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst implore
The gods' protection but the night before:
Follow me weeping to my turf, and there
Let fall a primrose and with it a tear;
Then lastly, let some weekly strewings be
Devoted to the memory of me.
Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep
Still 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 wrack
Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;"