Epilogue: New Tendencies
I
My Epilogue falls naturally into three parts, one dealing with prose and the others dealing, respectively, with the two different directions in which verse passed out of its Golden phase. And the first must, historically, be the least interesting of the three. The end of the century does not even approximately mark the end of a period in the history of our prose. In 1600 nearly all the great triumphs of Golden Verse were behind: in prose, Browne and Taylor and Milton and Traherne were still to come. The real break is later; when men like Tillotson and Dryden taught English prose to live on a sparer diet. It is only necessary here to mention two writers who even by 1600, as may be thought, are already moving towards that drier and more utilitarian manner: but I do not so much claim that status for them as submit the matter to every reader’s consideration.
A modern may at first find it hard to understand why Henry Smith (1550?–1591) was known in his own days as the ‘silver tongued’ and continued to be reprinted throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. There are, however, good reasons why he should have pleased many pious households who would not care for Donne or Taylor. His sermons are short and therefore suitable for reading aloud. They are free from royalist sentiment. They are, or at least seem to be, severely practical. They are puritanical in their theology and make no parade of profane learning: Smith hardly ever quotes except from the Bible. He can be eloquent—notably in the Godly Man’s Request—but he is no rhetorician. He writes a plain prose; and though some of his homely allegories (in The Wedding Garment or Satan’s Compassing the Earth) may remind us of Latimer, his plainness is not that of Drab prose. I think it looks forward to Dryden or even Swift, and that herein lies his historical importance. He knew what he was doing and is at pains to point out that ‘to preach simply is not to preach rudely and unlearnedly nor confusedly, but to preach plainly and perspicuously’. This ideal he certainly achieved. As a spiritual guide he may be ungracious and may too often substitute denunciation (which is easy) for counsel (which is hard). But he is clear, musical, and strong. Some of his short sentences could hardly be bettered: ‘Sin is neuer compleat till it be excused’, ‘This is the time, when the Devil saith the time is not yet’, ‘No man can abide to be disgraced in his wit: we had rather seem wicked than simple.’ His popularity may possibly be taken as evidence that many before Sprat sympathized with Sprat’s taste in style: not, to be sure, that most of those who read Smith were thinking about English prose, but that, almost unconsciously, they found the swellings and digressions of other preachers an obstacle.
The work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) falls almost entirely outside our period, but the little volume which he published in 1597 contains things worthy of notice. It consists of the ten earliest Essays, the Meditationes Sacrae, and the Colours of Good and Evil: in the second edition (1598) an English version, probably not by Bacon himself, was substituted for the Latin text of the Meditationes. This neglected work contains things very much more like ‘essays’ (in the ordinary sense of that word) than Bacon ever gave us again: the sections Of Moderation of Cares and Of earthly Hope, both on characteristically Johnsonian themes, are like the best Ramblers. The Colours is work of quite a different kind, a precursor almost of Miss Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose. By ‘coulers’ Bacon means not rhetorical colours but what we should call stock arguments: he is constructing a ‘defence to the minde’ by showing under what conditions such arguments are invalid. Here, as in the great passage about Idols in the Novum Organum, we see Bacon at his best: not as a discoverer of truths but as an exposer of fallacies. From these two works, diversely excellent, it is a shock to turn to the Essays. Even the completed Essays of 1625 is a book whose reputation curiously outweighs any real pleasure or profit that most people have found in it, a book (as my successor admirably says) which ‘everyone has read but no one is ever found reading’. The truth is, it is a book for adolescents. It is they who underline (as I see from the copy before me) sentences like ‘There is little friendshipe in the worlde, and least of all betweene equals’: a man of 40 either disbelieves it or takes it for granted. No one, even if he wished, could really learn ‘policie’ from Bacon, for cunning, even more than virtue, lives in minute particulars. What makes young readers think they are learning is Bacon’s manner; the dry, apophthegmatic sentences, in appearance so unrhetorical, so little concerned to produce an effect, fall on the ear like oracles and are thus in fact a most potent rhetoric. In that sense the Essays are a triumph of style, even of stylistic illusion. For the same reason they are better to quote than to re-read: they serve (in Bacon’s own phrase) ‘for ornaments’. But in these ten first essays, as they stand in the 1597 text, that style overshoots the mark: they are altogether too jejune, too atomic. And many good touches were left to be added to them in the later editions. Their connexion with Montaigne’s work is quite unimportant. If Bacon took his title from Montaigne, he took nothing else. His earliest essays resemble essays by Montaigne about as much as a metallic-looking cactus raised on the edge of a desert resembles a whole country-side of forest, filled with light and shade, well stocked with game, and hard to get out of. It is only in the Meditations that Bacon is at all like his predecessor; and even there, of course, briefly. Nor had he any successors. The cactus remains unique; interesting, curious, striking, worth going to see once, but sterile, inedible, cold and hard to the touch.
II
The reader’s attention has been drawn, at various stages, to indications of a taste existing in the Golden period and before it for which the Golden poetry itself did not cater in any unusual degree. We have seen that Churchyard (in his Light Bundle) thought rhyme by its very nature adapted to revive the spirits and move a smile. We have seen that Gascoigne (in his Notes of Instruction) emphasized ‘Invention’, the avoidance of things trite and obvious. Gabriel Harvey, commenting on Gascoigne’s ‘Invention’ in his commonplace-book, says in hoc genere Lucianus (but he must have meant to write Lucanus) excellebat, and also that ‘divine Homer’, Sallustius Bartasius; whom he praises in the New Letter of Notable Contents for his ‘colours of astonishing Rhetorique’ and ‘amazing deuises’. The same desire for something that would ‘astonish’ and ‘amaze’ can be seen in Puttenham’s ocular ‘proportion’ and in some of the bric-à-brac poetry of the Drab anthologies. Many men probably wanted poetry not so rich as the Golden but more sparkling, less emotional and more intellectual, less sweet and more piquant. That some wanted obscurity, the satirists and the Cryptic poets have shown. These tastes were to be gratified, and simultaneously transformed, by what is now called ‘Metaphysical’ poetry. The name is inept—‘Bartasian’ or even ‘Catachrestic’ would be better—but it is now too late to try to dislodge it.
The novelty, like most literary novelties, consisted in doing more continuously or to a higher degree something that had been done before. The ‘Metaphysical’ conceit grows up gradually, like euphuism. Everyone sees that there is nothing ‘Metaphysical’ about Spenser’s comparisons of two contesting knights to two contesting beasts; and everyone would describe as ‘Metaphysical’ Donne’s comparison of a pair of lovers to a pair of compasses. Between the two there are many stages. As the resemblances become more recondite, more intellectual and less sensuous or emotional, they are moving farther in the Metaphysical direction: at what point we shall begin to give them that name does not very much matter, nor what frequency of such recondite comparisons we demand in a poet before we call him a Metaphysical. It is more important to note that their frequent use is necessarily accompanied with another change in style.
Where comparisons are to be very recondite the things compared must often be sought for in fields of experience very remote from one another. Being remote, they will have already acquired different associations, so that they cannot now be re-united without a clash or shock. The feeling for Decorum in ancient, medieval, and Golden poetry flows from a desire to avoid such clashes or shocks. The desire, in some form, goes back to prehistoric times. This will be obvious if we reflect on the fact that while ancient life (and ancient comic poetry) was full of obscenities, yet ancient epic (save for a very few passages which are, significantly, intended to be funny) could almost all have been read aloud to a mixed audience in the reign of Queen Victoria. Certain things, well known to every ancient poet and perhaps disapproved by none, are from the first kept out of the grave kinds of poetry. In the world of fact, and in the stream of consciousness, all sorts of things jostle together: but the organized sensibility which we call taste had put some things apart by the time the Homeric poems were composed. It continued to hold them apart. Douglas’s ninth prologue states the rule of decorum as it existed by the end of the Middle Ages. The tendency of humanism was certainly not to relax this rule: it lies behind Scaliger’s complaint that the Homeric Andromache is ‘low’. Dryden, writing when the rule was once more in full vigour, says that ‘the metaphysics’ have no place in love-poetry. Chaucer’s Pandarus would have agreed with him: he had warned Troilus not to use ‘termes of physike’ in a love letter (Troilus, II. 1037). The desire for recondite comparisons lays a poet under the necessity of breaking such prohibitions.
But the new poets welcomed this necessity. The rule of decorum exists to avoid clashes or shocks to organized sensibility: but it was an early discovery that an occasional defiance of the rule, resulting in a shock, can give pleasure; a pleasure rich in tragic or comic possibilities. Indeed one of the purposes for which the rule exists is that it may sometimes be broken. Thus taking ‘decorum’ in its narrower sense to mean a standard of decency in our references to bodily functions, it is clear that all indecent humour depends on that standard of decency: the mention of certain things becomes funny only after we have agreed that they are unmentionable. Breaches of decorum in the wider, critical sense of the word work in the same way, though the shock need not be at all a comic one. The grimness of Aeschylus’ χρυσαμοιβὸς δ’, ’Αρης σωμάτων, War the body-broker (Agamemnon 437), depends on the fact that, in our organized sensibility, the ideas of heroic, legendary war and of small, contemporary business transactions lie so far apart. The moenia mundi in Lucretius are especially interesting, because there the comparison of something so vast and unimaginable as the universe to something so small and familiar as a walled town produces sublimity. A more flippant and whimsical use of the same method can be seen where Ovid describes Olympus (Met. I. 171 et seq.) in terms familiar to every Roman man about town—atria, plebs, potentes, penates, palatia. The Metaphysicals were making no absolute innovation when they deliberately produced poetic shocks by coupling what was sacred, august, remote, or inhuman with what was profane, hum-drum, familiar, and social, so that God is asked to ‘batter’ a heart, Christ’s ‘stretched sinews’ become fiddlestrings, cherubs have breakfasts, stars are a patrol, and snow puts a periwig on bald woods. The novelty lay in doing this sort of thing more often, and perhaps more violently, than previous poets had done, and indeed making it almost the mainstay of their poetics. For I think it is this discors concordia (Ovid, Met. I. 433), far more than its learning, that gives Metaphysical poetry its essential flavour.
It will be understood, of course, that these poets were not abolishing or ignoring poetic decorum but exploiting it, so to speak, in reverse. We must never suppose that they are writing from a sensibility in which the ‘decorous’ dissociations of high from low or the strange from the familiar did not exist. If there ever were a sensibility so ingenuous as that it was certainly prehistoric and probably pre-human: at no period would it have been harder to achieve than in the fifteen-nineties. Decorum was in their bones. It is interesting to note that John Hoskyns (1566–1638), sometimes claimed, and not without reason, as an Ur-Metaphysical, in his Directions for Speech and Style lays it down that ‘unless your purpose be to disgrace’ your metaphor must ‘be taken for a thinge of equall or greater dignity’. Metaphysical poetry is ‘twice born’. No literature could begin with it. It uses discords on the assumption that your taste is sufficiently educated to recognize them. If the immemorial standard of decorum were not in your mind before you began reading, there would be no point, no ‘wit’; only clownish insipidity. We may thus describe Metaphysical poetry either as being ‘parasitic’ (it lives on other, non-Metaphysical poetry) or as being of a ‘higher’ logical order (it presupposes other poetry).
Poetry which yokes the remote and the familiar suffers from the risk that what was familiar in the poet’s time may cease to be so in later centuries. In that way the edge has been taken off some Metaphysical images. It has been taken off the line about the released soul who ‘baits not at the Moone’, in Donne’s Second Anniversary (195) because to ‘bait’ is for us an archaic word with poetical associations: to get the effect which Donne intended we should now have to say that she does not stop for petrol or change trains. The full poignancy of ‘If I lack’d anything’ in Herbert’s ‘Loue bade me welcome’ is lost because ‘What d’ye lack?’ and ‘D’ye lack anything?’ are no longer commonplace: to get the right effect we should now need something like ‘Are you being attended to?’ Hence no old poetry needs to be read with such a constant alertness of the historical imagination as that of the Metaphysicals.
From what has been said it will be clear that no one can point to a moment at which poetry began to be Metaphysical nor to a poet who made it so; but of all poets perhaps Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas (1544–90) comes nearest to that position. He was a Huguenot and all his important works are religious: the Judith (1573), the Sepmaine, in its seven Jours (1578), and Seconde Sepmaine (1584) in which only four Jours are completed but each Jour is divided into four parts running to seven hundred-odd lines each. Any idea of austerity or pious drudgery which this account may arouse must be banished from the mind at once. He was a Gascon as well as a Calvinist; a literary d’Artagnan who would fight the French language, and the whole range of human knowledge, single handed: a man of delighted piety, of vivid, darting, uncontrollable imagination. Whatever else the Sepmaines may be, they are tinglingly effervescent. Sometimes there even arises a doubt whether all his discors concordia is intended to be quaint, or whether it is ingenuous: whether he is to be compared to Ovid describing Olympus in terms of Rome or rather to a savage poet, in all simplicity, giving the gods a kraal just like that of his own chief. I feel pretty certain that some passages must be understood that way. When he puts into Paradise (II. i, Eden 457)
Roses que chaque jour, comme on eust dit, les anges
Rangeoient en laz d’amours, triangles, et lozanges,
I think he is being ingenuous. He would have liked such a garden. The spirit which led Milton to an explicit rejection of ‘nice Art’ (Paradise Lost, IV. 241) comes from a real change of taste. So, when the Bartasian Adam, first transported from the place of his creation into the Garden, behaves like a country bumpkin on his first visit to Paris (ibid. 301 et seq.) I think du Bartas feels no quaintness. He is simply expressing an older kind of sensibility. Milton, once more, stands on our side of the dividing line: his Paradise is not like town to a countryman but like country to a townsman (ibid. IX. 445 et seq.). A more doubtful passage is that where Adam is commanded
Qu’il gardast le depost entre ses mains commis
Et cultivast ce parc que Dieu sans aucun terme
Soubs ces conditions luy bailloit comme à ferme (ibid. 260).
But if that is on the borderline, we have surely crossed it when God reserves the forbidden tree,
Pour tout droict de champart, de censive, et d’entree (ibid. 406),
or, in creating Eden, Himself tend le cordeau, alligne les allées (41). Elsewhere we emerge from the region of doubt altogether. In
Le ciel n’avoit encor sur nos chefs canoné
Ny l’escrit de divorce à la terre donné (ibid. 299),
or this, of the heaven (which may have suggested Donne’s ‘baits not at the Moone’),
Il va tousjours d’un train, et meu d’un faix sans faix,
Il ne scait point que c’est des chevaux de relais (I. ii. 907),
du Bartas certainly intended the clash of associations. When all allowances have been made for his real simplicities, much remains which is genuinely Metaphysical, dependent on a calculated breach of decorum.
It may also be asked whether the genial or animistic conception of Nature did not render all his anthropomorphic images less quaint, less ‘witty’, than they have since become. This is not disposed of by pointing out that du Bartas did not fully share that conception, denies that the stars are alive, and says they are carried round bon gré, maugré on their spheres tel que les cloux d’un char (I. iv. 89–120). For what had been intellectually rejected might still colour the sensibility. It would be reasonable to suppose that the animistic conception facilitated, both in du Bartas and in our own Metaphysicals, their peculiar kind of wit. But much of it, even against that background, would be quaint and piquant. Animism could not take all the edge off du Bartas’s picture of the wet winds that brought the Deluge (Chaque poil de leur barbe est une humide source, I. ii. 1082), or the gate and porter of lost Paradise (l’ange pour huissier, pour huis le cimeterre, II. i. 142), or the angelic escrimeur (I. i. 738) sent with his espée à deux mains against the Assyrians. These are in the same class as Milton’s sun in bed and Marvell’s patrol of stars.
Joshuah Sylvester (1563–1618), who had translated portions of du Bartas in 1590 and 1592, brought out his Divine Weeks and Works in 1605. He was a free translator who inserted digressions of his own (but not without warning) and substituted native equivalents for French allusions: his Adam is like a bumpkin in London, not in Paris. He sometimes exaggerates, and sometimes diminishes, the Metaphysical qualities of his original. Thus the famous line (II. i. 4. 144) ‘And perriwig with wooll the bald-pate woods’ has in the original nothing more remarkable to correspond to it than Et que de-flocs de laine il orne les forêts. On the other hand
de qui la parole
Serre et lasche la bride aux postillons d’Aeole (I. i. 3)
sinks in Sylvester to the less fanciful
at whose only word
Th’ Eolian scouts are quickly still’d and stirr’d,
and they run neck to neck at
Phoebus s’emparera du noir char de la lune (I. i. 364)
The Sun shall seize the black coach of the Moon.
Thus, sometimes overshooting, sometimes falling short, often hitting the target, Sylvester, on balance, preserves the literary quality of the French pretty well. Perhaps he makes it a little more conceited, but not much.
Du Bartas has had a strange fate. In his own age he was a serious rival to Ronsard. In England his influence was profound. He was doubtless ‘Sunday reading’ in many Protestant homes and we need not wonder that those who read him in childhood surrendered to him completely. More attractive food for young imagination and young scientific curiosity could hardly be found. All the Metaphysicals sound as if they had been brought up on him, or on Sylvester’s translation. But Milton no less. We feel du Bartas in all the quainter parts of Paradise Lost, where the universe is circumscribed with a pair of celestial compasses, or where the emergent beasts almost seem to have come from a film by Mr. Walt Disney. We should object less (or, at least, make a less bewildered objection) to ‘no fear lest dinner cool’ if we remembered that Milton was also a Bartasian. Then came the beginning of the Augustan age. Dryden, who confessed that he had admired Sylvester’s du Bartas in his youth, dropped him, as he dropped Cowley, as all the Metaphysicals were dropped. But the curious thing is that when Donne and the rest were revived in modern times, and humanist standards of criticism abandoned, there was no reconsideration of du Bartas. It is long overdue.
The saintly and heroic Jesuit Robert Southwell (1561–94) modestly but firmly refused to take any notice, as a poet, of the period in which he was living. He was not in the least ‘contemporary’: his work sometimes recalls the past, sometimes anticipates the immediate future which he was unconsciously helping to create, and often seems to belong to no period at all.
May neuer was the month of loue
For May is full of floures—
who, without the spelling to guide him, could date that? His weakest poems are gnomic and recall weak gnomic poems in Tottel: such are ‘Tymes goe by Turnes’, ‘From Fortune’s Reach’, and a few others. But many resemble the Tottelians where the Tottelians, as we saw, resemble eighteenth-century poetry. ‘The Prodigall Chylds Soul Wracke’ might have been written in the Drab Age, but also, with a very few alterations, might pass for Cowper or Watts. But it is as an early ‘Metaphysical’ that Southwell is of most historical interest and also, perhaps, at his best. He has not the metrical characteristics of the Metaphysicals, but his conceits have their subtlety. He loves, like Herbert, to play on the edge of bathos (triumphantly), comparing highest to lowest things or best to worst. Thus Grace ‘in Vertue’s key tunes Nature’s string’: the Holy Infant lies in the manger ‘as haye the brutest sinner to refresh’: Christ’s falling on the Via Dolorosa is ‘kissing the ground’ on which His foe (Man) treads; the beauty which God sees in the human soul
lul’d our heauenly Sampson fast asleepe
And laid Him in our feeble nature’s lapp.
Closer still to Herbert in its sharp homeliness is
My grace is saide: O death! Come take awaye.
Sometimes, even without conceits, as in ‘A Preparative to Prayer’ he has exactly Herbert’s prose-like, yet never prosaic, sobriety.
In content Southwell’s poetry is always religious. It is natural to connect the more tragic pieces with the horrors of his imprisonment and repeated tortures, but the connexion is by no means certain. ‘Dyer’s Phancy’ is clearly concerned with the pains of the spiritual life itself. Southwell writes much about the inner conflict, and here his poetic moral theology (as a confessor he may have talked differently) brings him close to Fisher. All sin seems to come from the senses, all beauty to belong to the soul—‘A briefe wherein all marveyles summed lye’. Life is a perpetual conflict
where halues must disagree
Or truce of halues the whole betraye.
Death parts ‘two ever-fighting foes’. I do not remember that he ever refers to the resurrection of the body. Hence long before he came into the rackmaster’s hands, he may have wished that ‘Sampson’s leaue’ (that is, Sampson’s dispensation from the prohibition of suicide) ‘a comon lawe were made’. Probably the sweetness of his own nature shielded him from a real knowledge of the mala mentis gaudia.
Southwell’s work is too small and too little varied for greatness: but it is very choice, very winning, and highly original. We never read him without wondering why we do not read him more. He has (in some poems) certain metrical peculiarities which, if I dealt with at all, I should have to deal with more largely than they deserve. For they are not characteristic: at his best, and most typical, he writes with almost Augustan smoothness, relieved occasionally by an internal rhyme: the greatness of the matter and the masculine precision of phrase save him from dullness.
John Hoskyns (1566–1638) is a much smaller, indeed an infinitesimal, poet and his letters to his wife (with whom he seems to have been passionately and unhappily in love till she died) are much more interesting than his verses, most of which are jeux d’esprit in Latin. In his English pieces he aims more or less continuously at wit and to that extent anticipates the new manner. ‘Absence, hear my protestation’ has sometimes been attributed to Donne. The following epitaph on ‘a young gentlewoman’ is, I believe, his happiest effort:
Nature in this small volume was about
To perfect what in woman was left out:
Yet carefull least a piece so well begun,
Should want preseruatiues when she had done:
Ere she could finish what she vndertook,
Threw dust upon it, and shut vp the book.
With a few exceptions the poems which John Donne (1572?–1631) wrote before the turn of the century cannot be accurately dated. They fall into three groups of very unequal value. We have, first, those pieces in which Donne is primarily an Ovidian. The ‘Heroical Epistle’ of Sapho to Philaenis is obviously modelled on the Heroides. It is, like Drayton’s ‘First Nimphal’, an essay in Lesbianism, but the theme which is in Drayton a pretext for formal beauty becomes in Donne a pretext for wit. Since both celebrate an obsession from which, in the nature of things, their authors cannot have suffered, both raise the doubt whether other Elizabethan poems of perversion may not embody merely humanistic affectations. One couplet in Donne’s Epistle has a formal prettiness very alien to his mature manner:
But thy right hand, and cheek, and eye, only
Are like thy other hand, and cheek, and eye (23–24).
It will be noticed that ‘only’ is not Simpsonian rhyme but mere inversion. I do not think the title proves that this piece was written after Drayton’s Heroical Epistles: probably the word ‘heroical’ means only ‘in the manner of the Heroides’. The twentieth Elegy, though it does not achieve, and probably does not attempt, any English equivalent to the Popian neatness of Ovid’s couplets, constructs a pert, pseudo-logical argument of the kind Ovid loved. This element, which reappears in Donne’s lyrics, is his most permanent debt to the Latin poet.
In the second class we have poems which, though not all satiric, all use the violently contorted metre which one kind of Elizabethan satirist favoured. This is a different thing from the metrical audacities (which have sometimes been exaggerated) in Donne’s lyrics. There we have an interplay between the ostensible metrical pattern and the speech rhythms that cross it. In this group, which contains Elegy XI, Satires III, IV, and V, the Storm and the Calm (1597) and the three epistles to Sir Henry Wotton, the ostensible metre is sometimes bludgeoned out of all but typographical existence. In parts of Satire IV, though the dialogue is in itself lively, one wonders what Donne could have supposed it would gain by being printed as verse. Elegy XI is a satire in all but name, and has great comic strength. Satire III is one of those poems which, like Sleep and Poetry, are so interesting for their content that we are apt to overrate them as poems. The thought is bold, honest, sequacious, and (what we might least expect in Donne) temperate: a touchstone which reveals the almost purely rhetorical and dramatic nature of the paradoxical ‘thought’ in some of his erotic poems. But the gems of this group are the Storm and Calm. They are of especial interest as evidence that though most of Donne’s poetry is highly subjective, this proceeded from choice and not from any inability to paint the outer world. On the contrary he can do this better than most of the Golden poets, and as well as most medieval poets. Only once (in the lines beginning ‘Compar’d to these’, Storm, 65) does he grow shrill: the breeze that ‘mildly kist our sailes’, the ‘rowling trench’, the rags of sail dropping, and the famous couplet about feathers and dust, are wholly admirable.
But of course it is the third group, the lyrics, that really reveal Donne’s greatness. Though I have spoken of his debts to Ovid and du Bartas, I do not at all mean to deny the astonishing novelty of the Songs and Sonnets. Without wasting time on any proclamation that this is ‘the new poetry’ or any denigration of his predecessors, Donne creates a kind of poem that had never been heard before. He does so by combining two qualities which, had he not combined them, we might still regard as incompatible. On the one hand, his lyrics are dramatic; they sound like ex tempore speech and imply a concrete situation. They rap out a hot answer to something already said (‘For godsake hold your tongue’ or ‘’Tis true, ‘tis day’) or start a conversation by expressing some thought as if it had that moment come into his mind (‘I wonder by my troth’ or ‘Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day’). To that extent they are like lyrics by Catullus: but even more immediate. On the other hand, he weaves into these seemingly casual utterances the recondite analogies and discors concordia which in du Bartas had had no lyric or dramatic function, being used rather to vivify matter the most remote from our daily life. These diverse excellences are usually held together by Donne’s adoption of the role of pleader (which Puttenham had desired of poets)—by his argument. The argument may be on different levels; shameless and essentially preposterous as in ‘Woman’s Constancy’, or fanciful as in ‘The Flea’; or (within the mood of the poem) serious. Thus in ‘Love’s Growth’ we seem to be finding, as we proceed, more and more adequate intellectual models for an experience which demands them. The famous image of the compasses is ‘wit’ in no sense that implies frivolity. Dante would have used it if he had thought of it. Its essential rectitude could be shown, if need were, by the fact that Omar Khayyam had anticipated it so closely. The ‘Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ is less perfect—the hyperbole about the squibs and the irrelevantly denigratory reference to the goat might be questioned—but here the models are emotional and intellectual at once. In Donne’s most serious lyrics, which I suppose to be his best, we have a poetry which almost is exactly opposite to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In Shakespeare each experience of the lover becomes a window through which we look out on immense prospects—on nature, the seasons, life and death, time and eternity. In Donne it is more like a burning-glass; angelology, natural philosophy, law, institutions are all drawn together, narrowed and focused at this one place and moment where a particular man is mocking, flattering, browbeating, laughing at, or laughing with, or adoring, a particular woman. And they all have, for Donne in the poem, no value or even existence except as they articulate and render more fully self-conscious the passion of that moment. His imagination is centripetal. Hence, though I am still unable to agree with those who find a valuable ‘philosophy’ of love in ‘The Ecstasy’, I now think that I erred equally in the past by criticizing the supposed ‘philosophy’. The real question is how that particular progression of thoughts works to make apprehensible the mood of that particular poem. Each of Donne’s lyrics is a world in itself; or, if you prefer, is the whole world foreshortened and transformed by, and sacrificed to, some one precise shade of passion. Each would therefore be suffocating, monstrous, if it lasted too long. But this intense concentration within the individual lyric is, of course, balanced by a great versatility of mood in the collection as a whole. When we re-read the Songs and Sonnets they always seem to be fewer than we had remembered. It is remarkable that in such short space so many different modes of love—frivolous, petulant, embittered, tragic, ‘Platonic’, rapturous, or tranquil—have found such striking expression.
The antithesis between Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Donne’s lyrics holds for versification as well as for temper. In all syllabic verse (though not in vers libre or in the metre of Beowulf) there is some difference between the ostensible metre, the pattern (as it were) announced or advertised, and the actual phonetic facts that fill it. Thus, even in ‘The daliance of the undiscerned winde’ there is a theoretical stress on of, but no real stress. The practice of the Drab poets was to sail as close to the metre as they possibly could. The practice of the Golden poets was to sail as close to it as they prudently could; to make music and variety by comparatively small and unobtrusive variations and with frequent coincidence. Shakespeare in the Sonnets is the supreme example. Donne, at his most characteristic, departed from the ostensible metre more widely and more often. There is thus what some would call a sort of counterpoint between the actual rhythm of his sentences and the ostensible norm. As will be seen in a moment, the word ‘counterpoint’ must be kept for a different purpose. I should prefer to call Donne’s usage Sprechgesang: a speaking tone against a background of imagined metrical pattern. Thus in the line ‘Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy, possest’ we hear the speech-rhythm ‘They’re but Múmmy’, with only one full stress, but are aware of the theoretical ‘They’re bút Mummý’ somewhere in the background. Similarly in ‘Spirits, as like soules as it can’, the word soules is ostensibly unaccented but in reality must carry as strong a stress as like. The ‘Nocturnal’ is perhaps the finest example. A high percentage of the lines are so built that they have to be read as if the syllables could hardly be dragged out of the speaker’s mouth; for he is freezing, dying, sinking into nothingness. Thus ‘Drown’d the whole world—vs two—oft did we grow’ lingers at the centre in four successive syllables which have stress, length, and emotional weight. Compare ‘some ends, some means: yea plants, yea stones’. An opposite effect of impatient speed is achieved in the line from ‘The Canonization’, ‘Take you a course, get you a place’. It would be merely glib and metallic if the ostensible metre were—as the actual is—choriambic: its value depends on our hearing it against the norm of ‘The Phoenix ridle hath more wit’ (23). In the same way a poem whose ostensible metre was as spondaic as certain lines actually are in the ‘Nocturnal’ would be merely a literary curiosity. Of course this element of Sprechgesang in Donne’s lyrics must not be exaggerated. Examples do not occur in every line or even in every poem. ‘The Undertaking’, ‘Sweetest Love’, the ‘Valediction forbidding mourning’, and the ‘Ecstasy’ use simple melody. Sometimes what might be mistaken for a breach of the ostensible metre is no such thing. If we took the line ‘Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare’ (from ‘A Valediction of weeping’) in isolation, we should think that the stress on thine which the ostensible rhythm demands had been crossed by a speech rhythm ‘in thine ármes’ where it had no existence; but in the context there is real, as well as ostensible, stress on thine because the lady’s arms are being contrasted with the (implied) arms of the sea in the following line. But though not a ubiquitous, Sprechgesang is a genuine feature of Donne’s poetry.
Much more could be said about this immensely influential poet, but he is in no present danger of neglect and my few remaining pages must be filled with some notice of two other departures from Golden technique.
III
The first of these two need be only briefly mentioned, since its great triumphs were in 1600 still far in the future and its character is very well known. This was the movement towards the Augustan mode. It imposed new restrictions on the couplet and even on the individual line, limiting its musical range but working insatiably towards perfection within those limits. We have seen it beginning in the satires of Lodge, and we can see it also in one passage from Donne, a surprising metrical ‘sport’ (Elegy XVII, 26–59).
The other, represented by Milton and Campion, extends and refines a technique which we have noticed in Nashe’s ‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss’ and Drayton’s Sirena. Like Donne, Milton and Campion depart freely from the ostensible metre. The difference is that while Donne crosses it with conversational rhythms, they cross it with rhythms as poetic, as unabashedly artful, as itself. Donne, as it were, talks against the music: they play one melodic pattern off against another. That is why I reserve the word ‘Counterpoint’ for their structure and distinguish it from his Sprechgesang. An example or two will make this clear. In Donne’s ‘Good Morrow’ what crosses the iambic pattern is the conversational rhythm of ‘What thou and I did till we lov’d’. In Paradise Lost, I. 26 the line ‘And justifie the wayes of God to men’, where the real and the ostensible rhythms coincide, is thrown up into enormous prominence by the two preceding lines where the real and ostensible are far apart. But then the real rhythm of those two lines (predominantly dactylic, and almost hinting, from far off, the Alcaic) is no more conversational than the purest iambics and suggests not speech but high-wrought choric song. Similarly at the beginning of III, ‘Hail holy light’ departs from the iambic not in the direction of speech rhythm but to become even more solemn, more chant-like. Sometimes, again, Milton’s variations seek a more boisterous, country-dancing music than that of the norm: as in ‘Wallowing—unweildie—enormous in their gate’. Nearly always, in one way or another, we get verse-rhythm played off against verse-rhythm, not against speech. And what Milton did with heroic verse Campion did with the lyric. It is not indeed impossible that Milton’s conception of the decasyllable was consciously influenced by Campion’s analysis of it in the Observations.
Thomas Campion has left us about a hundred and fifty lyrics of which there is only one that any ten lovers of poetry might be expected to agree in condemning: it is I. 14, a paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvii, in Two Books of Airs (c. 1613). With that exception his poems can be divided only into the good and the better, or else into the more and less characteristic. Sometimes he wrote good Drab as in ‘A daie, a night, an houre of sweete content’ or ‘Lift vp to heau’n, sad wretch’. At other times he wrote in the homely and rustic vein of ‘Jacke and Jone they thinke no ill’ or ‘I care not for these Ladies’, but of course with an artful homeliness, working his rusticity up into something finer. He can also do a pure Golden lyric like ‘There is a garden in her face’. Sometimes, but this very rare, he will do a dramatic lyric in which a passion seems to grow and change, as in ‘Thou are not faire for all thy red and white’, and this is his nearest approach to Donne. But it is a distant approach and few great lyric poets are more unlike; a comparison between Donne’s ‘Apparition’ and Campion’s ‘When thou must home to shades of vnder ground’, where there is some community of idea, illustrates this. There are passages, again, in the Masque at Brougham Castle, where Campion faintly reminds us of the lyric Milton. But none of these excellences show the essential Campion, the poet whose loss would leave a chasm in our literature.
To approach Campion’s poetic art without a consideration of his music is not so risky a proceeding as might be expected. The musical and the metrical pattern are often such that neither, of itself, would suggest the other. ‘Followe thy faire sunne’ (Book of Airs, 4) and ‘seeke the Lord’ (Two Books, I. 18) are set to the same air but are written in slightly different stanzas. The threefold repetition of ‘O come quickly’ in ‘Neuer weather-beaten Saile’ when it is sung corresponds to nothing in the form of the poem. However happily married to their ‘notes’ in the end, the poems had a rhythmical life of their own before the marriage, and it is their ‘music’ in that sense that the literary critic is concerned with. Campion’s immense originality and delicacy as a metrist appear in his earliest work, in the partly unsuccessful Canto Secundo of 1591. The basis is a line like Horace’s Ergo Quintilium perpetuus sopor (spondee, two choriambics, iambus). Campion’s lines 3 and 22 realize it completely, stresses coinciding with longs. His 8, 13, and 27 realize it quantitatively but not accentually, with stresses on shorts (hetherward, merry, sodaine), and one unstressed long (is meete). These are the most beautiful and probably truest to the Latin model. His 16 and 28 realize it accentually but not quantitatively, making the second of ‘enamoured’ and the first of ‘amorous’ do duty as longs. Some lines do not conform at all, such as 4, 11, 21, and 25. I think his hope was that the surrounding melody would carry us through them without a jar and with the added pleasure of relief from the strict norm. In line 11 (especially if we allow a vocalic R in ‘feltred’) I think he succeeds:
Blacke: their feltred haire torne with wrathful hand.
The poem is not a complete success but it already introduces us to the subtle audacities of Campion’s art, his counterpoint. Thus ‘Sleepe, angry beauty’ (Third Book, 25) is ostensibly in decasyllabics. Line 2 is really so; but a different, a more gravely lyrical, movement has been already suggested in the first line, with its opening spondee and its strong pause before the second sleep:
Sleepe, angry beauty,
Sleep and feare not me.
And the spondaic opening is picked up again in lines 10 and 11. The total effect is unlike that of any decasyllabic poem we have ever read. In ‘Loue me or not’ (Fourth Book, 10) we have decasyllabics in lines 4, 8, 11, and 12, but a majority of lines consist of two choriambics and an iambus:
Loue me or not—loue her I must—or die
Her to enioy—her to unite—to mee,
while the third starts off as if it were going to go like that and ends unexpectedly with the heavier ‘would my wish’d comforts giue’. There is also a free use of equivalence. In these lines from the Lords’ Masque,
Dance, dance, and visit now the shadowes of our ioy,
All in height and pleasing state, your changing formes imploy,
‘dance, dance’ is the metrical equal of ‘all in height’: in ‘Come, O come’ (Third Book, 23), the two syllables ‘Come, then’ in line 11 are perhaps equivalent to ‘As swift to me’ in line 12. But Campion’s greatest triumph is his handling of those ‘falling’ or ‘trochaic’ lines which, ordinarily carrying too much emotion ready-made in their very form, are deadly to minor poets. The long lines in ‘Follow thy faire sunne’ (Book of Airs, I. 4) are built on the same pattern as the long lines in that unfortunate stanza which Arnold chose for the second part of his Tristram. If there now seems little in common between ‘Raise the light, my page, that I may see her’ and ‘Follow those pure beames whose beautie burneth’, this is because, in Campion’s poem, each stanza ends with a ‘rising’ echo of its opening line, because the central lines are in a different pattern, because ‘follow’ is so much less ruthlessly trochaic than ‘raise the’, and finally because no dramatic urgency is admitted. Even more remarkably, in ‘Neuer weather-beaten Saile’ (Two Books, I. 11) the longest lines are in the same metre as Locksley Hall—if it is worth calling it ‘the same’ when we have been led up to them by the headless fourteeners, and their coarse emphasis has been muted by Campion’s refusal to allow a pause at the eighth syllable. Hence that peculiar hovering or floating effect which is so common in Campion’s long lines and so rare in other poets (though Shelley once approached it in ‘Ah, sister, Desolation is a delicate thing’). He can use even the line of Ormulum without deafening or wearying us: setting it in mono-rhymed triplets and varying rising with falling movement (Third Book, 14). He can make trochaic or ‘headless’ alexandrines delectable by mixing them with decasyllables and avoiding the banal, the inviting, pause at the fifth syllable (Two Books, I. 3). He will so write a fourteener that no reader can turn it back to its natural jog-trot—‘Attending as the starry flowre that the Suns noon-tide knowes’ (Two Books, II. 17). His subtlest patterns cannot even be exhibited in the space at my disposal. A poem like ‘Author of light’ (Two Books, I. 1) really has to be learned as we learn a strophe and antistrophe of Pindar, comparing each metrical phrase with its fellow (‘Sunne and Moone’ with ‘Sinne and Death’, ‘Starres and vnder-lights’ with ‘Hell and tempting Fiends’) before its full beauty is apparent. But then, lest you should suppose that he was confined in his own subtlety, he will next moment offer you something so straightforward as ‘The man of life vpright’ or ‘Now winter nights enlarge’.
Two passages may help us to approach Campion’s poetry in the right way. One is in the Lords’ Masque where he makes Orpheus say to Entheus (who is ‘Poeticke furie’),
thy excelling rapture, eu’n through things
That seems most light, is borne with sacred wings.
The other, from the preface of the Fourth Book, says: ‘The Apothecaries haue Bookes of gold, whose leaves being opened are so light as that they are subiect to be shaken with the least breath, yet rightly handled, they serue both for ornament and vse: such are light Ayres.’ The ‘excelling rapture’ works through what appears ‘most light’. Poetry—at least, this sort of poetry—has no weight at all. One breath of misdirected solemnity would blow it away. There is seriousness in Campion’s art, and sometimes in his matter—he did the best versified psalm we have, and it was the De Profundis (Two Books, I. 4). But he is the least tragic of the poets. The first song in the Book of Airs begins as a translation of Catullus’s Vivamus mea Lesbia; its effect is exquisitely unlike that of the original. The poignancy of soles occidere et redire possunt vanishes into the vast image ‘heau’ns great lampes doe diue Into their west and strait againe reuiue’. The speed, the brilliance, of their movements is what impresses us: we want to applaud rather than to weep. And when death appears in the last stanza, it is ‘timely’ death, and the tomb a ‘happie’ tomb, not to be vexed with mourning friends but graced with the pastimes of ‘louers rich in triumph’. Something sunny like Ronsard and gentle like Tibullus has dissipated the passion. The next air is ostensibly (for Campion plays tricks with his ostensible themes as with his ostensible metres) the traditional warning, Horace’s or Wyatt’s warning, that the mistress’s beauty will not last. Yet despite the last line our main impression is less that the girl will die than that Campion will live to a hale and trusty old age: his ‘Oke’ is so very ‘sturdie’. The third is typical of Campion’s attitude to sensuality. How wanton, yet also how seemingly innocent, how comical and sensible, the word ‘comfort’ is in this piece! There is no tension, no swooning, no ravening, in Campion’s poetry of fruition: he sings jocund sensuality, ‘country matters’. The fourth is, certainly, much graver. The explicit moral is the same as in the second; the mistress (the Sun) and the lover (the Shadow) will both die, ‘the Sun still proud, the shadow still disdained’. But the metaphor becomes a myth. We hardly think of a human lover. His sorrow seems to be part of the order of nature—an occasion not for resentment or passion but for a composed and not disagreeable melancholy. The fifth has a subject that invites tragic handling: but the rhythm, the refrain, and the hopeful resolution in the last stanza, all make it sound rather like the short-lived sorrow of a child. And the reader who does not like this kind of thing should take warning at once that this is what is going to happen to every subject when it enters the world of Campion’s imagination. His poetry is as nearly passionless as great poetry can be. There are passions somewhere in the background, but a passion, like a metre, is to Campion only a starting-point: not for moral or intellectual activity but for the creation of a new experience which could occur only in poetry. By the time he has finished, the original, the merely actual, passion hardly survives as such: it has all been used. This happens as much in his religious as in his erotic pieces. The Christian life becomes an idyll or a romance. He can make more use of ‘paradice’ than of ‘heauen’: a paradise ‘with Christall streames and flowers’ from which wicked beasts are excluded, or an enchanted garden on a mountain-top (for that is what the words ‘euer blooming’ and ‘high’ really effect in ‘Neuer weather-beaten Saile’). God’s ‘steepe hill is high’ and the world is a witch (Two Books, I. 18). The thirteenth of the same book may be compared with Lord Vaux’s ‘I lothe that I did loue’ in Tottel, which has the same theme. The Tottelian poem is dark and grim; Campion with almost a white, Blake-like vision, sees in his backward glance an adventure-story comparable to Bunyan’s. This is not the only passage where he reminds us of Blake. They are of course extremely different; it would be hard to find a poet less prophetic and, in some senses, less serious than Campion. But there is sometimes in both the same sense of remoteness from the common world, and the same impression of being in a place that has few colours but much brightness. Campion is fond of words like sun, beams, sun-like beauty, ‘a streame that brightly flowes’ and, for contrast, of groves and shadows. Yet perhaps aural experience means more to him than visual—‘silent’ days, the ‘peacefull’ western wind, ‘musicke’ which is the beloved’s ‘Eccho’ and ‘beauties simpathie’ (Book of Airs, 10). In one place (IV. 6), if I have not misunderstood him, he suggests that light exists only in order that beauty’s ‘grac’t words might better take’, as if the woman were merely an accompaniment to the audible woman. Certainly, unlike many of his sex, he thinks it a pity that a woman should be silent: ‘Awake, thou spring of speaking grace, mute rest becomes not thee’ (III. 13). No further development along the same line was possible after Campion. Indeed, when we read the description of his masques, we may feel that civilization itself, soon after his time, lost some of the elements which made such art possible. He ‘makes mouths at our speech’.
When we look back on the sixteenth century our main impression must be one of narrow escapes and unexpected recoveries. It looked as if our culture was going to be greatly impoverished. Yet somehow the ‘upstart’ Tudor aristocracy produced a Sidney and became fit to patronize a Spenser, an Inigo Jones, an early Milton. Somehow such an apparent makeshift as the Elizabethan church became the church of Hooker, Donne, Andrewes, Taylor, and Herbert. We stole most of the honey which the humanists were carrying without suffering very much from their stings. The occultism of the Renaissance, though not laid till the latter part of the seventeenth century, did much less permanent harm than might have been feared. Puritanism, though destined to a short triumph by ‘apostolic blows and knocks’, was intellectually defeated. One great loss had indeed been suffered by poetry. I have already noticed how the Golden style was limited in its range by its own extreme poeticalness. It must now be added that the Metaphysical style was equally, though diversely, limited. If the one was too rich, the other was too subtle and ebullient, to tell a plain tale. Hence, between the two, huge territories that had once flourished under the rule of poetry were in effect ceded to prose. They have not been recovered. The unadorned, but strictly formalized, archaism of Morris’s best narrative poetry (now totally misunderstood) was a successful technique for recovering the ancient and medieval liberty, but successful at a heavy cost. I do not suppose that the sixteenth century differs in these respects from any other arbitrarily selected stretch of years. It illustrates well enough the usual complex, unpatterned historical process; in which, while men often throw away irreplaceable wealth, they not infrequently escape what seemed inevitable dangers, not knowing that they have done either nor how they did it.