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 SONNETEERS—OTHER LYRIC POETRY—THE COLLECTIONS AND SONG-BOOKS—THE HISTORICAL POEMS—FITZ-GEOFFREY AND MARKHAM—WARNER—DANIEL DRAYTON—THE SATIRIC POETS—LODGE—HALL—MARSTON—DONNE.
The starting-point.

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 actual starting-point is arbitrary, because 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[186] when the poet’s mind began to create, as the starting-point, 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.
Italian influence.

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 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. The opposition to rhyme. 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[187] 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 ?neid, 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 doo bathe your brest,”

into this:—
“O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke
For to bathe your pretty breasts at all times,
Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come
At my request now.”

Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had so far shared that they played with the classic metres. Excuses for this. Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary, natural, and even inevitable. When there were no[188] 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[189] 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 of first half of Elizabeth’s reign.

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 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[190] written in England between Chaucer and Spenser, though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne, had been written before 1559—in the reign of Mary. Between this year and the publication of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) the voice of poetry was not mute in England—at least not the voice of those who were endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe spoke, with more emphasis than respect, of the “infinite fardles of printed pamphlets,” mostly “either meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as either in matter or forme) to poetry,” by which “this country is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished,” he was not wholly exaggerating. Translators were very busy, and not a few published original work. There were certainly many others who wrote but did not publish. But these forerunners could in no case have deserved more than the praise which Sir John Harington gave to one of them, George Turberville:—
“When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured
To polish barbarism with purer style.”

Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville diminishes their claim even to so much as this.

They were enslaved to the old fourteen-syllabled metre, which might or might not be printed in lines of eight and six, but which, in whatever way it was arranged, had a fatal tendency to fall into a rocking-horse movement. We constantly meet with rhymes like these:—

[191]
“The hawtye verse that Maro wrote
made Rome to wonder muche,
And mervayle none for why the style
and weightynes was such,
That all men judged Parnassus Mownt
had clefte herselfe in twayne,
And brought forth one that seemed to drop
from out Minervaes brayne.”

These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe’s Epitaph on Thomas Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind of metre which seems to come naturally to Englishmen, but their capacity for turning to doggerel is patent. They, with here and there a note which shows that if the writer had had the good fortune to be young after, and not before, The Shepherd’s Calendar, he might have contributed to the great body of exquisite Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse of the first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their own honour. They rough-harrowed the ground. George Turberville, who was born about 1530 and died about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates are 1535 or thereabouts to 1577; and Barnabe Googe, born in 1540, who died in 1594, tried many things; and if they did nothing else, they helped to extend the knowledge of the average Englishman, and to give practice to the language by their translations. The strongest of the three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to write a verse satire—The Steel Glass—was the author of some pretty occasional poetry, of a translation of Ariosto’s Gli Suppositi, stories from Bandello, and a tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have begun the writing of critical essays in English by his[192] brief note of Instruction for the construction of English verse, published as a preface to The Steel Glass.[61]
Spenser.

The sincerity with which the best intellects in England were studying poetry, and looking for a poet, helps to explain the instant recognition of Spenser. At this moment the times called for the man, and he came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably in 1552, of a Lancashire branch of a very ancient and famous house. His family was poor, and he received his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it is believed that he then spent some time in the north of England with his family before coming to London to seek his fortune. It could be obtained in one way only—by the favour of friends who could secure him a place. That Spenser was resolved to make poetry the chief aim of his life is certain; but he could not live by it at a time when no form of literature, with the exception of the drama, brought certain payment, and even the drama gave but starvation wages. He had to rely on the willingness of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he was a poet. Spenser was not without friends who might have been useful. At Cambridge he had become known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older man, a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of pragmatical[193] self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity, exercised a certain limited influence over him. Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester and Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritanism was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally undoubted though very different Puritanism of the queen’s favourite. But Leicester did, and it may be could do, little for his client. The Shepherd’s Calendar was published in 1579, a year or two after Spenser came to London, but he had no share in “the rich fee which poets won’t divide.” There is no need to look far for the causes of his disappointment. Elizabeth had little money, and much to do with it, while her Lord Treasurer, Burghley, who had no love for Leicester, was the man to meet any pensioned poet with the ungracious attitude of Sully to Casaubon: “You are no use, sir, and you cost the king as much as two captains.” In 1580 Spenser accompanied Lord Grey to Ireland, where estates of confiscated land were to be won. From that time he was plunged into the horrible strife between the anarchy of Celtic Ireland and the repression of the queen’s officers, who fought for order with ferocious means. He obtained a grant of land in County Cork, married in 1594, and reached some measure of prosperity. A small but apparently ill-paid pension was granted him. The rebellion of 1598 shattered his fortunes altogether. His house at Kilcolman was burnt in the usual fashion of the brutal Irish wars, and it was said that one of his children perished with it. Spenser fled to England, and died on the 16th January 1599—“for lack of bread,”[194] according to Ben Jonson, and undoubtedly in great poverty.
Order of his work.

It seems certain that he began writing very young, for some translations from Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay, which were afterwards reprinted unchanged, or changed only by rhyme, in his acknowledged works, appeared in The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings of John Van Noodt in 1569. Ten years, however, passed before he published The Shepherd’s Calendar, and then an equal period before he prepared to bring out the first three books of The Fa?rie Queen, which was registered at Stationers’ Hall on the last day of 1589, and appeared in the following spring. Next year—1591—appeared the minor poems, under the name of The Complaints (The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgil’s Gnat, Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruins of Rome, Muiopotmos, and The Visions). The address to the reader gives a promise of other poems, which have been lost; and it may be noted that the same thing had happened with The Shepherd’s Calendar. The Daphnaida followed. In 1596 the Amoretti, the Epithalamium, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of The Fa?rie Queen, the Hymns, and the Prothalamium were published within a short time of one another. Nothing more was to appear in his life. Part of a seventh book of The Fa?rie Queen, and a prose treatise giving a very vivid, very true, and very terrible “View of the Present State of Ireland,” were printed after his death. The treatise did not come out for thirty[195] years, when it was published by Sir J. Ware. The Fragments were included in the new edition of The Fa?rie Queen in 1611.

Few great poets were ever so little beholden to predecessors as Spenser. He had before him Chaucer, and near his own time Sackville, who had written with original force in Chaucer’s stanza. There were also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few English followers, and the French poets of the Pléiade. In his Shepherd’s Calendar Spenser imitated the Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and he translated from the French. Neither he nor any man could live uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the Renaissance are abundantly audible in his work—its love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the melancholy which was natural in men whose ideals were unattainable in a very harsh world, which was never harder than amid the disruption of faith, the violent clash of contending forces, and the unchaining of violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there might have been all this, and no Spenser. His metre. He is great by what was wholly his own, both in form and spirit. The Shepherd’s Calendar may be called the work of his prentice hand, done when he had not attained complete control of his own vast powers. Yet it is not so far below the impeccable verse of his later years as it is above the level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth’s reign. The part of imitation which there is in it is the weakest. What he inherited from nobody was the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It[196] is out of his own genius that he perfected the form in which that melody found its full expression. The Spenserian stanza does not appear in The Shepherd’s Calendar; but it had been constructed, and was being used in the earlier cantos of The Fa?rie Queen at least immediately after the earlier work was finished. It is surely no longer necessary to argue that this form was not imitated from the Italians. The ottava rima and the sonnet may have—indeed must have—helped Spenser with indications, but they did no more. Had he been an imitator he would have done as the Spaniards did,—he would have taken an already finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly. But he did a very different thing. He constructed a stanza which is to English what the ottava rima is to the Italian. It is just the difference between a successor and a mere follower, that whereas the second toils to reproduce the letter, the first gives a new form to the spirit. The relation in which Spenser stands to the Italians is that he carried on the torch of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and bore it to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly less independent than his stanza, and all talk of obligation to any model becomes idle indeed when we think of the melody of the Hymns, the Epithalamium, and the Prothalamium.
The character of his poetry.

The matter which this form bodied forth to the world is not to be expressed in our meagre prose. It could be uttered only in his own perfect verse. The mere doctrine may be defined with no overwhelming amount of difficulty, for there[197] is a strong and, not only unconcealed but, firmly avowed didactic aim in Spenser. It was no purpose of his to be “the idle singer of an empty day.” He held with his friend Sir Philip Sidney that the poet “doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.” The poet in their creed was the seer, and Spenser strove to fulfil his lofty function by teaching the Platonism which endeavours to trace back the love of virtue and the love of beauty to that divine origin where they are one, and by singing a Puritanism which is the poetic expression of the Englishman’s innate conviction that the religion which is not interpreted into conduct is an empty hypocrisy. But all this didactic side of Spenser is the side which was not necessarily poetic. In so far as the Hymns merely teach a Platonist doctrine, they do not surpass the final pages of Castiglione’s Courtier. In so far as The Fa?rie Queen is an allegory, it is no more consistent, ingenious, or perfectly adapted to its purpose than The Pilgrim’s Progress. But over all that could be adequately expressed in prose Spenser cast a spell which carried it into the realm of fancy—that golden world of the poet which Sir Philip Sidney contrasted with nature’s “brazen” earth. A very trifling change in the wording of one passage of The Apologie for Poetrie is all that is needed to make it applicable to The Fa?rie Queen: “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as ‘this poet hath’ done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers; nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.” It is to this word that the[198] attempt to estimate Spenser finally leads. By the magic of his melody, and the force of that imagination which could transmute all from prose to poetry, he made a lovely world of poetry out of the real earth. When he used ugliness, as he could, it was for the purpose of heightening beauty by contrast.

As the poet of The Fa?rie Queen, Spenser stands apart in his time. He is connected with his contemporaries by the sonnet. This form, introduced into English literature by Surrey and Wyatt, had been little, and ill, cultivated in the duller generation which followed them. But with the revival of the poetic genius of England towards the middle of the queen’s reign, it naturally attracted men who were in search of richer and more artful forms of verse. Moreover, it lent itself to the expression of feeling, and that was of itself enough to make it popular with a lyrical generation. For this reason the sonnet work of the Elizabethans has been made subject to a great deal of comment which is not of the nature of literary criticism. It has been treated as a form of confession and veiled autobiography. Various considerations—the limits of space being not the least important among them—make it impossible to discuss the question at length here. Moreover, where the external evidence is naught, and the internal evidence is subject to various interpretations, which is always the case, comment on the inner meaning of the sonnets must always be more or less guesswork. To start from arbitrary premisses, with the certainty of arriving at no definite conclusion, ought to be considered[199] a waste of time. Sidney may have decided to leave it on record that he found out his love for Penelope Devereux too late, and that he then hovered round the thought of adultery. Shakespeare may have made poetry out of his friendship and his love. If so, the passions which left them so much masters of themselves as to be able to produce these artistic forms of verse cannot have been very absorbing. Finished sonnets do not come to men either in their sleep or in anguish. What we know for certain of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and others is, that they lived active lives in the world, and that they were artists. The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in the terms of his art, whether he be poet, painter, or actor. It is because he has the constructive imagination and the power of expression that he gives truth to his work. The genius which could give reality to the sorrow of Constance, to the manhood of the Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello, to more men, women, and passions than could be named on this page, was quite adequate to giving the same reality to the scheme of the Sonnets. As much may be said of the other Elizabethans, each in his place in the scale. From the literary point of view, too, it is of no importance how the debate be settled. Poetry is not valuable because it tells us that this or the other dead poet felt as a man the common hopes and disappointments of humanity, but because it fixes what all men can feel in forms of immortal beauty.
Sir P. Sidney.

The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary[200] society gathered around Sir Philip Sidney in and about 1580. His high birth,—he was son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth’s sinister favourite, the Earl of Leicester,—the fact that he stood in the relation of patron to many of the men of letters of his time, his amiable personal character, and the heroic circumstances of his death in a skirmish fought to prevent a Spanish convoy from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586, have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very shining figure. It is possible that he is more conspicuous than his intrinsic power would have made him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must have been a great personal fascination in the man who could inspire the reverential love which was felt for Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Greville, while his Apologie for Poetrie, his Arcadia, the sonnets collected under the title of Astrophel and Stella, with his other poems, remain to prove that wherever he had been born he would have left his mark on the time.
The Apologie for Poetrie.

The Arcadia may be left aside for the present, but The Apologie for Poetrie, though written in prose, cannot, without violently separating things akin to one another, be taken apart from his poetry. It is to some extent our English equivalent for the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue fran?aise of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new school of poets. The circumstances in which the two were written differ widely. The Pléiade, with the Frenchman’s usual love of a large and minute ordonnance,[201] drew up a scheme for the conquest and orderly division of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was provoked into writing his little treatise by a very foolish tract printed in 1579, and named The School of Abuse, the work of one Stephen Gosson (1535-1624), an unsuccessful playwright who took orders, and lived to a great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. The School of Abuse, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney without his consent, and perhaps because he was the nephew of the chief protector of the Puritans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as it contains a statement of the narrow puritan view that all modern poetry was wicked, and that the theatre was the home of every corruption. It is chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the signal honour to give it an answer. The Apologie for Poetrie is in no sense an Ars Poetica. Sidney does not deal with the formal part of poetry. He replies to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion that it is the noblest of all things. The view and the spirit of the Elizabethan time are nowhere more clearly shown than in the Apologie. That Sidney fell into one gross heresy is true. He said that poetry was independent of metre. But that was not an error likely to mislead either himself or others. Against it has to be set his conception of poetry as the noble expression of that which in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose. There may not be much guidance in this; but it is not as a guide that the Apologie is to be considered, but as the challenge of the coming English poetry, lyrical, epic, and[202] dramatic—a declaration that it was to be something more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it was to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and thought, of fancy and imagination. If English poets of that generation looked up to Sidney, it was not only for the reasons given above, but because he spoke early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The style of the Apologie is full of the animation and sincerity of the writer. It has a colour and melody unknown to the downright sober English of his predecessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and is free from the conceits of his own Arcadia.

Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the high note of the great Elizabethan poetry.

No part of his work was printed in his life. The Arcadia was prepared for publication immediately after his death in 1586, but it did not appear till 1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more accurate version followed in 1593. His Sonnets and Lyrics. The sonnets and other lyric pieces, collected under the title of Astrophel and Stella, were printed in 1591, and the Apologie for Poetrie in 1595. His metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript till 1823, while some fragments of his verse have only been recovered recently by Dr Grosart.[62] But the date of printing was comparatively unimportant at a time when a poet’s work not only could be, but generally was, known in manuscript to the reading world long before it was published. Sidney was renowned[203] as a poet and prose-writer in his lifetime, and his case is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count his influence as having been exercised from the day when his sonnets were handed about among his friends, which must have been as early as, if not earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must have learnt at once that the day when Gascoigne, Turberville, Googe, or an industrious decent verse-writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented English poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the same high level. The epithet of “jejune” which Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be justly used of any of them; but the sonnet beginning, “Ph?bus was judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love,” or the other which has for first line, “I on my horse and love on me, doth try,” or the third, “O grammar-rules, O now your virtues show,” are not equally safe against the other epithet “frigid.” They are at least more marked by laboured and cold-blooded conceit than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have an accomplishment of form which was new, and in the others the greater qualities are by no means rarely shown. The first in the accepted order—“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show,”—with its ringing last line, “‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart and write,’” and the last, “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,” are abundantly lofty and passionate; and were, in the sense in which the word was used, “insolent”—that is, unprecedented—in the English poetry of that generation. To these it would be easy to add many others.[204] “With how slow steps, O Moon”; “Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance,” are but two of them; while the sonnet “Good brother Philip” is a gem of gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not confine himself to the so-cal............