Chapter XVI: Found at Last! (9)

In this time of inspiration, with all England, from prince to peasant, bursting into song and three-fourths Catholic, we find from Spenser to Cowley a scant dozen, or, counting Shakspere, at most a baker’s dozen, of Catholic poets worth naming. And Shakspere, in spite of Charles Butler’s ingenious theory and its spirited revival by Mr. George Wilkes, we can scarcely claim. That great poet’s religious creed, like other important features of his life, must no doubt remain always matter of conjecture. If he was a Catholic, his creed was probably no more than a tradition, strong enough to keep his pages free from the pictures of dissolute monks and nuns in which most of his contemporary playwrights delighted, but far from the fervor which sent Southwell to the scaffold, or the sincerity which, in a milder age, made Sherburne welcome poverty and disgrace. Omitting Shakspere, then, our muster-roll is but short. For this there were many reasons. In those days there was other work for Catholics than verse-making; the church needed martyrs, not minstrels, and the blood-stained record of the English mission tells how intrepidly the need was met. Southwell and Campian are only two of a brilliant band almost equally gifted, equally heroic. The life they led promised little for polite letters. Hunted like wild beasts, in hourly danger of the most cruel and ignominious death; sleeping, when they slept, in hayricks or the open fields; studying, when they caught a breathing-spell for study, in caves and thickets—many of these noble youths have left behind them proofs of a genius which, under happier auspices, would have borne abundant fruit. Southwell’s poems, composed in the intervals of thirteen rackings, reveal a spirit of uncommon force and beauty. Campian is known to have written at least one tragedy, _Nectar and Ambrosia_, performed at Vienna before the Emperor Rodolph. It must be remembered, too, that both of these dauntless missionaries were cut off in the very flower of their age, Southwell being thirty-two and Campian forty when executed. Francis Beaumont, cousin and namesake of the dramatist, was a Jesuit and a poet. So was Jasper Heywood, son of the epigrammatist. He translated several tragedies of Seneca, and is said by some to have been one of the one hundred and twenty-eight priests executed by the clement Elizabeth. He is one of Cibber’s Poets. Ellis Heywood, his brother, also a Jesuit, though he left behind him a prose work in Italian, is not known to have written in verse. Of Crashaw, whose fortune it was to live at a time when the storm of persecution had spent its fiercest fury, when Catholics were subject no longer to be murdered, but only to be robbed—of Crashaw, whose “power and opulence of invention” Coleridge has remarked, another critic has said that, with more taste and judgment,” he would have outstripped most of his contemporaries, even Cowley.”

These were all priests. But outside of the priesthood Catholics found work in other directions which left little leisure for literary pursuits. Chidiock Titchbourne, whose talents and unhappy fate the elder Disraeli has feelingly commemorated, was one of “an association in London of young Catholic gentlemen of family who met at the house of Mr. Gilbert, in Fetter Lane, and took care of Jesuits.” Thomas Habington, an associate of Titchbourne in this enterprise, and who, if not a poet himself, was at least the father of a poet, narrowly escaped hanging for concealing in his house the Jesuits Garnett and Oldcome, accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Dymoke, the champion of England, apparently the same who translated _Il Pastor Fido_, won the title to a more glorious championship by dying (1610) in the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for his resolute refusal to conform. Dr. Lodge, a most charming poet as well as an eminent physician, we find in “the list of popish recusants indicted at the sessions holden for London and Middlesex, February 15, 1604.” It is of interest to note _en passant_ that with Dr. Lodge was indicted for the same cause “Ambrose Rookwood, of the army.” Twenty months later Ambrose Rookwood, of the army, expressed his opinion of this treatment by engaging in the Gunpowder Treason. At a later period we have Sir Edward Sherburne, a scholar and poet of no mean pretensions, resigning offices of large emolument rather than betray his faith. Certainly, under the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts a Catholic poet may be said to have cultivated his art under difficulties.

The obstacles in the way of Catholics, then and long after, not only for obtaining culture but the rudiments of learning, were indeed enormous. Classed by legislative enactment with “forgers, perjurers, and outlaws,” they were denied education for themselves or their children, except at the cost of conscience or of ruinous penalties. Their liberty they held at twenty days’ notice; their lives at a moment’s purchase. At any hour of the day or night their houses were open to the invasion of ruffianly pursuivants, searching ostensibly for “Mass-books” and other “popish mummeries,” but prone to confound recusant jewels or broad gold pieces with the relics of superstition; and for such robberies they had absolutely no redress. In the courts of justice they found not only no protection, but renewed oppression. To use a phrase often misused, they had really no rights which a conforming subject was bound to respect, and their freedom, their fortunes, nay, their lives, were at the mercy of the rapacity or the malice of their Protestant neighbors. Much of their time they spent in going to and from prison; they crowded the common jails in such multitudes that many new ones had to be opened for the sole accommodation of these hardened malefactors; and their estates were impoverished to pay for the privilege, not of going to their own church—that was denied them in any event—but of staying away from one they could not conscientiously enter. Men so occupied doubtless found ample employment for their leisure without making acrostics to Elizabeth Regina or panegyrics on the “best of poets.”

Yet even this untoward time and chilling air yielded blossoms of Catholic poetry which we need not disdain to gather. Some of the daintiest of them have been culled by careful gleaners like Headley and Ellis and Southey, and a stray flower here and there salutes us in the more tasteful modern collections, such as Mr. De Vere’s _Selections_, Mr. Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury_, or Mr. Stoddard’s _Melodies and Madrigals_, the latter a gem among its kind. But the bulk of the Catholic poetry of this period is practically unknown. Massinger, luckier than any of his great rivals (for Shakspere was above rivalry), still keeps the stage with a single comedy, _A New Way to pay Old Debts_. But Shirley, little his inferior in dramatic ability, is, in spite of Dyce’s elegant edition, utterly neglected. He may be said to owe his rescue from oblivion to that one noble song in _The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon_, “The Glories of our Blood and State”—a song which alone is worth a library of modern ballads, and which might be called truly Horatian but for a moral elevation which Horace never reached. And even this song, almost his sole slender hold on immortality, Shirley came near losing; for in a spurious compilation of Butler’s posthumous works it is given to the author of _Hudibras_, and there entitled _A Thought upon Death upon hearing of the Murder of Charles I._, though anything further from Butler’s style can scarcely be imagined. Ben Jonson—if, in virtue of his twelve years spent in the church and the period of his best work, he may be considered as a Catholic poet at all—“rare old Ben,” in spite of his weighty thought, his pungent humor, his fertile fancy, remains among the authors who are widely talked of and little read. Lodge again, who may dispute with Bishop Hall the honor of being the earliest English satirist, and who, “though subject to a critic’s marginal,” gives evidence of a glow and richness of imagination not common even in that opulent time—Lodge has no literary existence except as one of the wistful shades that flit through the Hades of the cyclopædias. Sir William Davenant has from Southey the distinguished compliment that, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, he wrote in numbers which, for precision and clearness and felicity and strength, have never been surpassed. Yet who now reads _Gondibert_, or its notable preface, which inspired Dryden with the germ of dramatic criticism? Sir Edward Sherburne, whom Mr. Dyce calls “an accomplished versifier,” whose translations may even now be read with pleasure, and whose learning was above the average of his learned time, is equally forgotten. Crashaw is remembered less for himself than as the friend of Cowley, whose monody on his death, in Johnson’s opinion, has “beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainments, but above their ambition.” Southwell we think of as the martyr rather than as the poet. The verses of Sir Aston Cokayn and his friend Sir Kenelm Digby are not, perhaps, of the sort which the world does not willingly let die; yet the plays of the former are not without merit, especially _Frappolin creduto principe_, an adaptation of the same Italian original whence Shakspere took the hint for his prologue to the _Taming of the Shrew_. His minor poems, too, if they have no other merit, throw some curious side lights on the literary history of the time. The life of Sir Kenelm Digby, “of whose acquaintance,” says Dryden, “all his contemporaries seem to have been proud,” was itself a poem, and certainly one more worthy of being told than that of many of the gentlemen whom Johnson’s vigorous pen has thrust into uneasy and unnatural immortality.

“Sweet Constable, who takes the wond’ring ear
And lays it up in willing prisonment,”

who was rated as the first sonneteer of his time, is as little known as the pure and pensive Habington, the only love-poet of the reign of Charles I. whose pages are without stain. The two last-named writers, however, we may expect to see more noticed, both having been lately reprinted—Constable’s _Diana_ by Pickering, and Habington’s _Castara_ being included in the admirable and wonderfully cheap series of English reprints edited by Mr. Edward Arber.

We had thought to give a few specimens of at least the more obscure of the writers last mentioned. But we have already overstepped our limits and must bring this ramble to an end. The reader who may be tempted for himself to loiter in these unfamiliar ways will meet with much to reward him. “Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good” he will find in abundance:

“… rich in fit epithets,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words.”

[103] Henry VII.’s chapel.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.