A History of English Literature by George Saintsbury (e novels for free .txt) π
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- Author: George Saintsbury
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Long did I love, but all in vain;
I loving, was not loved again:
For which my heart sustained much woe.
It fits not maids to use men so,
Just deserts are not regarded,
Never love so ill rewarded.
But 'all is lost that is not sought,'
'Oft wit proves best that's dearest bought.'
To comfort, not to cause their grief.
Where most I merit, least I find:
No marvel, since that love is blind.
Had she been kind as she was fair,
My case had been more strange and rare.
But women love not by desert,
Reason in them hath weakest part.
Then henceforth let them love that list,
I will beware of 'had I wist.'"
1596 (putting the Amoretti, which is sometimes assigned to this year, aside) was again fruitful with Griffin's Fidessa, Lynch's Diella, and Smith's Chloris. Fidessa, though distinctly "young," is one of the most interesting of the clearly imitative class of these sonnets, and contains some very graceful poetry, especially the following, one of the Sleep class, which will serve as a good example of the minor sonneteers:β
The captive's liberty, and his freedom's song!
Balm of the bruisèd heart! man's chief felicity!
Brother of quiet Death, when Life is too too long!
A Comedy it is, and now an History;
What is not sleep unto the feeble mind?
It easeth him that toils, and him that's sorry;
It makes the deaf to hear; to see, the blind;
Ungentle Sleep! thou helpest all but me,
For when I sleep my soul is vexèd most.
It is Fidessa that doth master thee
If she approach; alas! thy power is lost.
But here she is! See, how he runs amain!
I fear, at night, he will not come again."
Diella, a set of thirty-eight sonnets prefixed to the "Amorous poem of Diego and Genevra," is more elaborate in colouring but somewhat less fresh and genuine; while Chloris, whose author was a friend of Spenser's, approaches to the pastoral in the plan and phrasing of its fifty sonnets.
Such are the most remarkable members of a group of English poetry, which yields to few such groups in interest. It is connected by a strong similarity of feelingβif any one likes, even by a strong imitation of the same models. But in following those models and expressing those feelings, its members, even the humblest of them, have shown remarkable poetical capacity; while of the chiefs we can only say, as has been said more than once already, that the matter and form together acknowledge, and indeed admit of, no superior.
In close connection with these groups of sonnets, displaying very much the same poetical characteristics and in some cases written by the same authors, there occurs a great body of miscellaneous poetical writing produced during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and ranging from long poems of the allegorical or amatory kind to the briefest lyrics and madrigals. Sometimes this work appeared independently; sometimes it was inserted in the plays and prose pamphlets of the time. As has already been said, some of our authors, notably Lodge and Greene, did in this way work which far exceeds in merit any of their more ambitious pieces, and which in a certain unborrowed and incommunicable poetic grace hardly leaves anything of the time behind it. Shakespere himself, in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, has in a more elaborate but closely allied kind of poetry displayed less mature, but scarcely less, genius than in his dramatic and sonnet work. It is my own opinion that the actual poetical worth of Richard Barnfield, to whom an exquisite poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, long ascribed to Shakespere, is now more justly assigned, has, owing to this assignment and to the singular character of his chief other poem, The Affectionate Shepherd, been considerably overrated. It is unfortunately as complete if not as common a mistake to suppose that any one who disdains his country's morality must be a good poet, as to set down any one who disdains it without further examination for a bad one. The simple fact, as it strikes a critic, is that "As it fell upon a day" is miles above anything else of Barnfield's, and is not like anything else of his, while it is very like things of Shakespere's. The best thing to be said for Barnfield is that he was an avowed and enthusiastic imitator and follower of Spenser. His poetical work (we might have included the short series of sonnets to Cynthia in the division of sonneteers) was all written when he was a very young man, and he died when he was not a very old one, a bachelor country-gentleman in Warwickshire. Putting the exquisite "As it fell upon a day" out of question (which, if he wrote it, is one of the not very numerous examples of perfect poetry written by a very imperfect poet), Barnfield has, in no extraordinary measure, the common attributes of this wonderful timeβpoetical enthusiasm, fresh and unhackneyed expression, metrical charm, and gorgeous colouring, which does not find itself ill-matched with accurate drawing of nature. He is above the average Elizabethan, and his very bad taste in The Affectionate Shepherd (a following of Virgil's Second Eclogue) may be excused as a humanist crotchet of the time. His rarity, his eccentricity, and the curious mixing up of his work with Shakespere's have done him something more than yeoman's service with recent critics. But he may have a specimen:β
Upon a time at swilling Bacchus' house,
Where dainty cates upon the board were set,
And goblets full of wine to drink carouse:
Where Love and Death did love the liquor so
That out they fall, and to the fray they go.
Filled full of arrowsβthe one of fatal steel,
The other all of gold; Death's shaft was black,
But Love's was yellowβFortune turned her wheel,
And from Death's quiver fell a fatal shaft
That under Cupid by the wind was waft.
Another arrow out of Cupid's quiver;
The which was carried by the wind at will,
And under Death the amorous shaft did shiver.[27]
They being parted, Love took up Death's dart,
And Death took up Love's arrow for his part."
[27] Not, of course = "break," but "shudder."
There is perhaps more genuine poetic worth, though there is less accomplishment of form, in the unfortunate Father Robert Southwell, who was executed as a traitor on the 20th of February 1595. Southwell belonged to a distinguished family, and was born (probably) at Horsham St. Faiths, in Norfolk, about the year 1560. He was stolen by a gipsy in his youth, but was recovered; and a much worse misfortune befell him in being sent for education not to Oxford or Cambridge but to Douay, where he got into the hands of the Jesuits, and joined their order. He was sent on a mission to England; and (no doubt conscientiously) violating the law there, was after some years of hiding and suspicion betrayed, arrested, treated with great harshness in prison, and at last, as has been said, executed. No specific acts of treason were even charged against him; and he earnestly denied any designs whatever against the Queen and kingdom, nor can it be doubted that he merely paid the penalty of others' misdeeds. His work both in prose and poetry was not inconsiderable, and the poetry was repeatedly printed in rather confusing and imperfect editions after his death. The longest, but by no means the best, piece is St. Peter's Complaint. The best unquestionably is The Burning Babe, which, though fairly well known, must be given:β
Surpris'd I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright, did in the air appear,
Who scorchèd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though His floods should quench His flames which with His tears were fed;
'Alas!' quoth He, 'but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel My fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defilèd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My blood:'
With these He vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas Day."
Something of the glow of this appears elsewhere in the poems, which are, without exception, religious. They have not a little of the "hectic" tone, which marks still more strongly the chief English Roman Catholic poet of the next century, Crashaw; but are never, as Crashaw sometimes is, hysterical. On the whole, as was remarked in a former chapter, they belong rather to the pre-Spenserian class in diction and metre, though with something of the Italian touch. Occasional roughnesses in them may be at least partly attributed to the evident fact that the author thought of nothing less than of merely "cultivating the muses." His religious fervour is of the simplest and most genuine kind, and his poems are a natural and unforced expression of it.
It is difficult in the brief space which can here be allotted to the subject to pass in review the throng of miscellaneous poets and poetry indicated under this group. The reprints of Dr. Grosart and Mr. Arber, supplemented in a few cases by recourse to the older recoveries of Brydges, Haslewood, Park, Collier, and others, bring before the student a mass of brilliant and beautiful matter, often mixed with a good deal of slag and scoriæ, but seldom deficient in the true poetical ore. The mere collections of madrigals and songs, actually intended for casual performance at a time when almost every accomplished and well-bred gentleman or lady was expected to oblige the company, which Mr. Arber's invaluable English Garner and Mr. Bullen's Elizabethan Lyrics give from the collections edited or produced by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others, represent such a body of verse as probably could not be got together, with the same origin and circumstances, in any quarter-century of any nation's history since the foundation of the world. In Campion especially the lyrical quality is extraordinary. He was long almost inaccessible, but Mr. Bullen's edition of 1889 has made knowledge of him easy. His birth-year is unknown, but he died in 1620. He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Inns of Court, and a physician in good practice. He has left us a masque; four Books of Airs (1601-17?), in which the gems given below, and many others, occur; and a sometimes rather unfairly characterised critical treatise,
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