185 CHAPTER VII. ELIZABETHAN POETRY. THE STARTING-POINT-ITALIAN INFLUENCE-THE OPPOSITION TO RHYME -EXCUSES FOR THIS-ITS LITTLE EFFECT-POETRY OF FIRST HALF OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN-SPENSER-ORDER OF HIS WORK-HIS METRE -CHARACTER OF HIS POETRY-SIR P. SIDNEY-THE APOLOGIE FOR POETRIE-HIS SONNETS AND LYRICS-WATSON-THE SONNETEERSOTHER LYRIC POETRY-THE COLLECTIONS AND SONG-BOOKS-THE HISTORICAL POEMS-FITZ-GEOFFREY AND MARKHAM WARNER DANIEL DRAYTON-THE SATIRIC POETS--LODGE-HALL-MARSTON -DONNE. A LONG silence and two generations of effort preceded the renaissance of English poetry, which may conveniently, though perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, be said to date from the publication of the Shepherd's Calendar in 1579. The choice of this year as the The starting actual starting-point is arbitrary, because point. Spenser was already recognised by his friends as the "new poet," and his work was known among them in manuscript. It had therefore begun to live, and to exercise an influence, before it was given. to the world. But the convention which treats the ascertainable date of printing, and not the first moment when the poet's mind began to create, as the startingpoint, is useful, and we may (always remembering that it is a convention) put 1579 at the head of the history of the great Elizabethan poetry. With us, as with the Spaniard, the spark, which was to grow into so great a flame, was brought from Italy. Before Spenser there had been Surrey and Wyatt, who had worked in the Italian metres in the reign of Henry VIII., and their example had been set up for all to follow by the publication of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. There had also been the leaders of the New Learning, and the classic models. But the resemblance between the history of poetry in the two Italian influence. countries goes no further. Italy could affect only individual Englishmen. No such similarity of language, beliefs, and character existed between the two countries as would have enabled Italy to press on us as it did on Spain, all along the line. There was not the same proximity, nor had there been an equally close previous relationship of pupil to master stretching far back into the Middle Ages. The Italian influence in England was rather an incitement to independent effort than a mere pattern to be copied, as it was to the Spaniard. Nor were the Greek and Latin models more, though in this case a deliberate effort was made to bring English verse into subjection to ancient prosody. Much ridicule was shed then, and has been poured since, on those who endeavoured to write English verse by quantity only. The quaint pragmatic figure of Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who was the most conspicuous, though not The opposition to rhyme. the first of the school, was of itself enough to confer a certain absurdity on the effort. And the verse produced in this struggle to do the impossible was altogether worthy of Harvey's oddities. Putting aside Stanyhurst's Eneid, published in 1582, which is the most bulky example of misapplied labour, it ought, one would think, to have been warning enough to those who thought to force English into an alien mould when they found a writer of the real intelligence and natural good taste of Webbe, author of The Discourse of English Poetrie, contentedly pronouncing such a line as this: "Hedgerows hott doo resound with grasshops mournfully squeeking. Webbe did worse, for he seems really to have believed that he improved Spenser, whom he admired and recognised as the new poet, when he turned the song in The Shepherd's Calendar beginning— "Ye dainty Nymphes that in this blessed brooke "O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had so far shared that they played with the classic metres. Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary, natural, and even inevitable. When there were no Excuses for this. native models newer than Chaucer to follow, and when the splendour of classic literature was just being fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who were in search of a poetic form should have been deluded into thinking that they could reproduce what they admired, or should have agreed with Ascham that "to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks in true versifying, were even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely eat bread among men." Its little effect. Then this mania, pedantry, or whatever other evil name may be given it, never attained to the dignity of doing harm. No Englishman who could write good rhyme was ever deterred from doing so by the fear that he would become a Goth, and eat acorns with swine. The real belief of the Elizabethan poets was expressed in The Arte of English Poesie, which tradition has assigned to George Puttenham. If we have not the feet of the Greeks and Latins, which we "as yet never went about to frame (the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it), we have instead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more than they ever had, by reason of our rime, and tunable concords, or simphonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore may be an arte in our vulgar, and that very methodicall and commendable." The Arte of English Poesie was published in 1589. Webbe's discourse had appeared three years before. The conflict, such as it was, was really over, though the superiority of " versifying" to rhyming might continue to be discussed as an academic question. Thomas Campion, who, as if to show the hollowness of his own cause, was a writer of rhymed songs of great beauty, might talk" of the childish titilation of riming" in his Art of English Poetry in 1602, and be answered by Daniel in his Defence of Ryme, but they were discussing "a question of the schools." The attempt to turn English poetry from its natural course belongs to the curiosities of literary history. Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth's reign that we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the Poetry of first half of Elizabeth's reign. time. There was no great drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse had fallen. Those who look for an explanation of the flowering or the barrenness of literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence of genius in a people, may account for this by the troubled times which followed the death of Henry VIII. But the return of peace and security with the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The first twenty years of her reign were as barren as the disturbed years of Edward or Mary. Indeed they were even poorer, for Sackville's Induction to The Mirror of Magistrates and his Complaint of Buckingham, which have been recognised as the best verse |