Chapter V: Elizabethan Criticism (2)

and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant, indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The first part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second, “A Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.

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Footnote 235:

In order of composition, not of publication.

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This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author has set about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer, “the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have begun to help forward “the exchange of barbarous and balductum[236] rhymes with artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much better than Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the _Schoolmaster_. He would like (as should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and Precepts will probably not be very different; but he will take time before drafting them finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before framing a standard English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that “we beginners” (this from the author of these truly “barbarous and balductum” antics to the author of the _Faerie Queene_ is distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and Ennius, of setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George Bilchaunger,” in very doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at Spenser’s “See ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the same kind, which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of Stanyhurst—

“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell!
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”

with yet another—

“Since _Galateo_[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”

He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s own “emblems” in the _Calendar_, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in _The Dying Pelican_, is certainly, or in the _Dreams_, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the _Faerie Queene_, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s _Nine Comedies_ [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is to the _Orlando_, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words, “If so be the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and fear Nemesis.

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Footnote 236:

This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good
example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness
by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him;
and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his _Virgil_.
Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (_vide_ Mr Arber’s Reprint in the
_English Scholars Library_, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly
to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English
literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has
some method in its madness.

Footnote 237:

La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.

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After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to _“mea domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”_, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[238]

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Footnote 238:

The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the
Camden Society’s _Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey_, touch literary
matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the
later (1592) _Four Letters_, the embroidery of railing at the dead
Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary
canvas.

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[Sidenote: _The Puritan attack on Poetry._]

Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly transcending form.

Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about their private history and character. [Sidenote: _Gosson._] What disgust, what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.

Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s _School of Abuse_,[239] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled _Reply_,[240] and the famous _Defence of Poesy_ or _Apology for Poetry_[241] which Sidney (to whom Gosson had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or (more probably from what we know of him) out of amiable and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult, he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.

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Footnote 239:

Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent
_Apology_. I wish he had added the _Ephemerides of Phialo_ which
accompanied the _Apology_, and the _Plays Confuted_ of three years
later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add
something to the controversy.

Footnote 240:

Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in
_Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets_ (London, 1892).

Footnote 241:

Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868;
Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.

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_The School of Abuse_ (which is written in such a style as almost to out-Euphuise the contemporary _Euphues_ itself) is critical wholly from the moral side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or possible, state of poetry. [Sidenote: The School of Abuse.] There are even, the author says, some good plays, including at least one of his own; but the whole of ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical with those which Puritan teachers had for some years past been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral and religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with the lies and the licence of poets and players.

Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it _may_ be the _Honest Excuses_ to which Gosson refers as having been published against him) is almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little personal invective. [Sidenote: _Lodge’s_ Reply.] Lodge strings together all the classical names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that Poetry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even the theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any independent justification of them as good ones, especially from the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—though interesting as critical work from the associate of great creators in drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction—is merely one of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence to an attack, logically as unreal though actually dangerous. The charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa[242] at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in all countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet them with weapons of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because the defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was being provided by one of themselves in the shape of _The Faerie Queene_.

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Footnote 242:

_V. supra_, p. 28.

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Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more importance. [Sidenote: _Sidney’s_ Apology for Poetry.] It is not free from faults—in fact, it has often been pointed out that some of Sidney’s doctrines, if they had been accepted, would have made the best efforts of Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which more presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he does not give exclusive attention to it.

His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have, in his _mimesis_, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[243]

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Footnote 243:

Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn,
are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes
them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older
writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr
Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on
the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and
Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver
shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in
no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his
_attitude_ is very different from theirs as a whole, and already
significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.

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It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the _Apology_, though the indirect references are fairly clear. [Sidenote: _Abstract of it._] Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of _his_ office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet _vates_, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[244] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a _maker_. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.

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Footnote 244:

Savonarola, _v. sup._, p. 20.

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The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. These classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic, comic, &c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, “for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And again, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet.” Xenophon and Heliodorus were both poets in prose.

Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then by parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or mistress-knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against poetry at some length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is _philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_ than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though not in fact. Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended; and it is in the eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about _Chevy Chase_[245] occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,” he argues that if they _were_ inseparable,[246] verse is the most excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.

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Footnote 245:

“I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of
Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a
trumpet.”

Footnote 246:

“As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”

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Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ is good; so is Surrey; and _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except _Gorboduc_, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in _Gorboduc_, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious how cool the _reductio ad absurdum_ will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits _two_ styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer.”

The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically, can hardly be exaggerated. [Sidenote: _Its minor shortcomings_] It exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the _Calendar_, few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus _did_ use dialect: it would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.

It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.

There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy. [Sidenote: _and major heresies._] In both the authority of the ancients must again bear good part of the blame, but in both he has additional excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis that verse _were_ necessary to poetry, though he does not think it is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As for the plays, there is still more excuse for him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point; and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side—at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared, and there is great difference between the two theatres. In English itself not one single great or even good play certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from what we have of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed upon classical and Italian literature. [Sidenote: _The excuses of both,_] And it is noteworthy that even _Gorboduc_, with all its regularity and “Senecation,” does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is here, as elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in the position of a man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and observations, confronted with a stage of creative production but just improving from a very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as against new ones which had as yet had no success.

And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. [Sidenote: _and their ample compensation._] That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the _Faerie Queene_, that was to give us _Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_. What though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body _is_ art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the _afflatus_, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French.

In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s _afflatus_, but all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for more than a century. [Sidenote: _King James’s_ Reulis and Cautelis.] These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”) _Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie_, 1585; William Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poesie_, next year; and the anonymous _Arte of English Poesie_, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George Puttenham.[248]

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Footnote 247:

It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well
known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was
never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.

Footnote 248:

All three are included in Mr. Arber’s _Reprints_, where the desirable,
or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly
found.

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The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than its authorship. It was attached to James’s _Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art_, of which it gives some rules: it shows that Buchanan had taken pains with his pupil; and it also exhibits that slightly scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means unreal, shrewdness and acumen which distinguished the British Solomon in his happier moments. It is characteristic that James is not in the least afraid of the charge of attending to mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without any rhetorical exordium into what he calls “just colours”—do not rhyme on the same syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables only, do not let your first or last word exceed two or three syllables at most. This dread of polysyllables, so curious to us, was very common at the time: it was one of the things from which Shakespeare’s silent sovereignty delivered us by such touches of spell-dissolving mastery as

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the iamb; while he very oddly gives the word “foot” to the syllable, not the combination of syllables; and lays down the entirely arbitrary rule that the number of “feet”—_i.e._, syllables—must be even, not odd. There is to be a sharp section (“cæsura”) in the middle of every line, long or short; and the difference of long, short, and “indifferent” (common) feet or syllables is dwelt upon, with its influence of “flowing,” as the King calls rhythm. Cautions on diction follow, and some against commonplaces, which look as if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a suggestion confirmed elsewhere.[249] Invention is briefly touched; and the tract finishes with a short account of the kinds of verse: “rhyme”—_i.e._, the heroic couplet, “quhilk servis onely for lang historieis”; a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed _aabaabbab_; _ottava rima_, which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which he calls “Troilus verse”; “rouncifals,” or “tumbling verse” (doggerel alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; “common” verse (octosyllable couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse,” &c.

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Footnote 249:

It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of
Gascoigne.

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The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an honest, and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with special reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short day, but which had been specially affected—not to say specially disorganised—by the revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was the study of French (where the iamb had long been the only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gascoigne, induced James to extend that crippling limitation to English; and the same influence may be seen in his insistence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of which at least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but they express the genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some order on the shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dissyllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for the Royal prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of English poetry at the time when he wrote.

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Footnote 250:

Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient
stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.

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One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. [Sidenote: _Webbe’s_ Discourse.] There is more of this root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of _Tancred and Gismund_) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,” “our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.

It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol (but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them, he was bitten with “the new versifying.” [Sidenote: _Slight in knowledge,_] It was rather his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance of English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew him through the references of Chaucer and others: though three editions of the _Confessio_—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has, what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate, though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and odd matters.” That he thinks _Piers Plowman_ later than Lydgate is unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant, not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes, and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third. But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if “quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, and that he can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer, Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named), and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the “ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he specifies nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which almost necessarily accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.

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Footnote 251:

Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves exception perhaps
best.

Footnote 252:

The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly to seek in
English now than, _teste_ Porson, they were a century ago in
Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely done; and of
course some Englishmen have followed the Germans. Lydgate himself knew
better, though some of the shorter poems attributed to him are
metrically, as well as in other ways, not contemptible.

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His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne, Sidney, and King James. [Sidenote: _but enthusiastic,_] After a dedication (not more than excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of England,” who, if they had been inclined to be censorious, might have replied that Master Webbe, while complimenting them, went about to show that the objects of his compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while all other studies are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.” We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or with necessary alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.

[Sidenote: _if uncritical,_]

The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological definition of poetry, as “making,” and the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but almost immediately digresses into praise of our late famous English poet who wrote the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ and a wish to see his “English Poet” (mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English historical sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh laudation of Spenser.

Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry (especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds, &c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several times cites Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations from him and other Latins. He then proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the _Æneid_, with large citations both from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he returns once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the _Calendar_ is practically his theme all through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then, after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a translation of his own of the _Georgics_, which has got into the hands of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-question, to which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced, from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master, and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres, always illustrated, where possible, from the _Calendar_. Still harking back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have been effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and Latin forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with English to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do: Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash enough to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful

“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”

It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag of poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus of Horace’s rules, gathered not merely out of the _Ep. ad Pisones_ but elsewhere, and an “epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will happen when “the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes the piece.

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Footnote 253:

_V. infra_, p. 354.

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[Sidenote: _in appreciation._]

On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more, we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately erudite, but intensely _interested_ in matters literary, and especially in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste, but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much for the good of the nation—or—not at all for its good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which let him have due honour.

Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. [Sidenote: _Puttenham’s (?)_ Art of English Poesie.] In poetical faculty there is very little to choose between them—the abundant specimens of his own powers, which the author or _The Art of English Poesie_ gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred to, _Partheniades_), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (_v. infra_). On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for so much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe, considered as a critic. _The Art of English Poesy_, which, as has been said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which, from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun, before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable in range and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born _cir._ 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless.

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Footnote 254:

The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly put, in
Mr Arber’s _Introduction_. The first attribution is in Bolton (_v.
infra_) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not
quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who
has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons
of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s,
and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship is
well known.

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The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the _Ancren Riwle_ would say) into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and “Of Ornament.” [Sidenote: _Its erudition._] It begins, as usual, with observations on the words poet and maker, references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is fitly written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is commendably short. The writer lays it down, with reasons, that there may be an Art of English as of Latin and Greek poetry; but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at large” as to poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often seen.[255] Indeed we must lay our account with the almost certain fact that all writers of this period had seen Sidney’s _Defence_ at least in MS. or had heard of it. He comes closer to business with his remarks on the irreption of rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but even than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the question—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what reputation poets were with princes of old, and how they be now contemptible (wherein Puttenham shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with modern European literature), and then turns to the subject or matter of poesy and the forms thereof, handling the latter at great length, and with a fair sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to _English_ poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather more knowledge than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere) far more comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted that, engaging as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” he does not show to advantage in the patronising glance in passing at “that other gentleman who wrote the late _Shepherd’s Calendar_,” contrasted with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which it may please her Majesty to employ her pen.” But here the allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory of later days can never wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend, the curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote about Gloriana.

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Footnote 255:

Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes
this as well as other things in his fling at the _Art_.

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The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff, stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence, situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and proportion in figure. [Sidenote: _Systematic arrangement_] On most of these heads he speaks more or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the “new versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject.

About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had glanced at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, _and to the intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit_,”[257] he “will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse.

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Footnote 256:

Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the
book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben
Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a
large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this
and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition.

Footnote 257:

“Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though,
with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its
little ways rather well.

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The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and is evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure. [Sidenote: _and exuberant indulgence in Figures._] It is called “Of Ornament,” but practically deals with the whole question of _lexis_ or style, so that it is at least common to Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect, too, it belongs more specially to the former, in that it contains the most elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found, up to its time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein Puttenham (sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his printer) ransacks the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with explanations and examples) of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded and followed by more general remarks, of which some account must be given.

Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general, Puttenham proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament, not merely may but ought to be couched in something more than a conversational style. This added grace must be given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On diction he has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly commending the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not provincial speech, or that of seaports, or of universities, or in other ways merely technical. “The usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about London, within ten miles and not much above” is his norm. There is also a noteworthy and very early reference to English dictionaries, and a cautious section on neologisms introduced from other tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a constant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.

The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished, Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main principle of ornament, which he calls _Decorum_ or “Decency,” dividing and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery, and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.

We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme _v._ 'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the adjective great before Dryden.

The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory matter[258] of his translation of the _Orlando_, which contains the gibe at Puttenham above referred to. [Sidenote: _Minors: Harington, Meres, Webster, Bolton, &c._] It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington differs in allowing more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then comes Francis Meres, whose _Palladis Tamia_[259] (1598) is to be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface to _The White Devil_ (1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir W. Vaughan in _The Golden Grove_ (1600) had earlier dealt, and Bolton[260] in his _Hypercritica_ (1616), and Peacham in his _Complete Gentleman_ (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.

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Footnote 258:

Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to _Promos and Cassandra_
(1578) and A. Fraunce’s _Arcadian Rhetoric_ (1588) are earlier still.
The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of
English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres,
his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in
his _Conversations_, _v. infra_, p. 199.

Footnote 259:

Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, _English Garner_, ii.
94 _sq._

Footnote 260:

Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv.
204 _sq._, ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and
speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting
the _Hymns_) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can
“endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman,
Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt,
Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital,
judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.

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The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to be found, without doubt, in the _Observations in the Art of English Poesy_ of Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent _Defence of Rhyme_ of Samuel Daniel. [Sidenote: _Campion and his_ Observations.] The former was issued in 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more than twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty after the appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s _Schoolmaster_. In the interval the true system of English prosody had put itself practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the _doyen_ (except poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt altogether against the nature of our language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself. On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot than an iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much _drink up_ the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs, anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming poems, notably the famous “_Rose-Cheeked Laura_,” and the beautiful “_Constant to None_,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take one of Campion’s own poems (written mostly _after_ the _Observations_) in natural rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by its absence.

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Footnote 261:

Ed. Bullen, _Works of Dr Thomas Campion_, London, 1889.

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