From Chaucer to Tennyson
is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
proportion." Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination,
and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay _On Death_,
into eloquence--the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar
off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that
_lumen siccum_ which he loved to commend, "not drenched or bloodied by
the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was
a dry wine.
A popular class of books in the 17th century were "characters" or "witty
descriptions of the properties of sundry persons," such as the Good
Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some modern
_Heads of the People_, where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the
Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of
the kind is George Eliot's _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, which
derives its title from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose
character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature.
The most popular character-book in Europe in the 17th century was La
Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But this was not published till 1688. In England
the fashion had been set in 1614, by the _Characters_ of Sir Thomas
Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One
of Overbury's sketches--the _Fair and Happy Milkmaid_--is justly
celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. "Her breath is
her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made
hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with
pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel,
she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She bestows her year's
wages at next fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in
the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and
surgery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold
sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none;
yet to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old
songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and
all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers
stuck upon her winding-sheet."
England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and
rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said
Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the
pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into
the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of them through his plays,
and wrote others like them himself:
Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song.
That old and antique song we heard last night.
Methinks it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The knitters and the spinners in the sun
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth[20]
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.
[Footnote 20: Simple truth.]
Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with
sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in
miscellanies, such as the _Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon_, and
Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of
whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known
writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly,
Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. Series of
love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's _Astrophel and
Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond,
Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or
imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as
William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shepherd's Pipe_
(1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, _The Passionate
Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love
stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and Juliet_ (the source of
Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero and Leander_, and
Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of Lucrece_, the first of
these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though
handled in any thing but a classical manner. Wordsworth said finely of
Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died
of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are
by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at
every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his
dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of
narration, and that, in the _Rape of Lucrece_ especially, the poet
lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening
on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have
done.
In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the
same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in
some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who
wrote the last four "sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, "with
woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown." One is reminded that modern
poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one
compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with
Byron's ringing lines:
The wind is high on Helle's wave,
As on that night of stormy water,
When love, who sent, forgot to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter.
[Footnote 21: From Sestos on the Hellespont, where Hero dwelt.]
Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best
remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from
1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a
great Elizabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not
his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond
his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was written, as has
been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of
Chapman's time. Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer_, is well known. In his translation of the _Odyssey_, Chapman
employed the ten-syllabled heroic line chosen by most of the standard
translators; but for the _Iliad_ he used the long "fourteener."
Certainly all later versions--Pope's and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and
Bryant's--seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English,
which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble
metrist. In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many
passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's
hexameters.
From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Antumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire
Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face
Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.
The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea,
found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's
_Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_ (prefixed to
Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and descriptive poems,
like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586; Samuel Daniel's _History
of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael Drayton's _Barons' Wars,_ 1596,
_England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598, and _Polyolbion,_ 1613. The very
plan of these works was fatal to their success. It is not easy to digest
history and geography into poetry. Drayton was the most considerable
poet of the three, but his _Polyolbion_ was nothing more than a
"gazeteer in rime," a topographical survey of England and Wales, with
tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty
books and nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of
Marlowe, that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the
first poets had;" and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are
only occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His
_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of
Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and is
interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular
fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a good
honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative piece, his
_Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland,_ a sermon apparently on the text
of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of philosophy,
Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.
But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in
the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that
some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without
having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes
when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of
immortal thought and passion. Such was in England the fortune of the
stage play. At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that
were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays
that had no literary quality whatever. These were taken from the Bible,
and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history
and additions to the church service on feasts and saints' days.
Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them,
and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air. In some English
cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed almost
to the close of the 16th century. And in the celebrated Passion Play at
Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle play that has
survived to our own day. These were followed by the moral plays, in
which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty Juventus, Riches,
Folly, and Good Demeanaunce were the persons of the drama. The comic
character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained
in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who
became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The "formal Vice,
Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor
the roaring Devil with his wooden sword:
...with his dagger of lath
In his rage and his wrath
Cries 'Aha!' to the Devil,
'Pare your nails, Goodman Evil!'
He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch,
of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his
back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes.
Masques and interludes--the latter a species of short farce--were
popular at the court of Henry VIII. Elizabeth was often entertained at
the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with
translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto. Original comedies and
tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence and Seneca, and
chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings. There was a
master of the revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be
performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the
Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. These early
plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and