(The lover having dreamed enjoying of his love complaineth that the dream is not either longer or truer.) "Unstable dream, according to the place Be steadfast once, or else at least be true. Thou brought'st not her into these tossing seas But mad'st my sprite to live, my care to increase,1> Wyatt's awkwardness is not limited to the decasyllable, for some of his most breakneck work is in shorter lines, though on the whole he is safer here. Surrey is a far superior metrist. Neither in his sonnets, nor in his various stanzas composed of heroics, nor in what may be called his doggerel metres-the fatally fluent Alexandrines, fourteeners, and admixtures of both, which dominated English poetry from his time to Spenser's, and were never quite rejected during the Elizabethan period-do we find evidence of the want of ear or the want of resource in language which makes Wyatt's versification frequently disgusting. Surrey has even no small mastery of what may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence in successive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a mere reduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the Eneid (not published in Tottel's Miscellany) Xhe has the great honour of being the originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a bad pattern. The following In original "tencrease," and below "timbrace." This substitution of elision for slur or hiatus passed for a time into the t' and th' of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. It is doubtless a mistake. sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, and blank verse extract, may be useful :— (Complaint that his lady after she knew of his love kept her face alway hidden from him.) "I never saw my lady lay apart Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat, Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great ; The which unwares did wound my woeful breast. In summer sun, in winter's breath, a frost Whereby the lights of her fair looks I lost." 1 (Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea.) "Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile, Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me a while. Let them sit still: it skills them not what chance come on the dice. But ye whom love hath bound by order of desire, To love your lords whose good deserts none other would require, Whose woeful plight and sorrows great, no tongue can well define.”2 1 As printed exactly in both first and second editions this sonnet is evidently corrupt, and the variations between the two are additional evidence of this. I have ventured to change "hid " to "hides" in line 10, and to alter the punctuation in line 13. If the reader takes "that" in line 5 as="so tha. "that" in line 10 as = "which" (i.c. "black"), and "that" in line II with "which,” he will now, I think, find it intelligible. Line 13 is usually printed : "In summer, sun: in winter's breath, a frost. Now no one would compare a black silk hood to the sun, and a reference to line 2 will show the real meaning. The hood is a frost which lasts through summer and winter alike. 2 In reading these combinations it must be remembered that is there always a strong cæsura in the midst of the first and Alexandrine line. It is the Alexandrine which Mr. Browning has imitated in Fifine, not that of Drayton, or of the various practitioners of the Spenserian stanza from Spenser himself downwards. "It was the (n)1 night; the sound and quiet sleep 'Gan swage their cares, mindless of travails past. Unhappy she that on no sleep could chance, Her cares redouble: love doth rise and rage again,3 The "other" or "uncertain" authors, though interesting enough for purposes of literary comparison, are very inferior to Wyatt and Surrey. Grimald, the supposed editor, though his verse must not, of course, be judged with reference to a more advanced state of things than his own, is but a journeyman versesmith. "Sith, Blackwood, you have mind to take a wife, I pray you tell wherefore you like that life," is a kind of foretaste of Crabbe in its bland ignoring of the formal graces of poetry. He acquits himself tolerably in the combinations of Alexandrines and fourteeners noticed above, nor does he ever fall into the worst kind of jog-trot of which in his immediate successors we find so much. His epitaphs and elegies are his best work, and the best of them is that on his mother. Very much the same may be said of the strictly miscellaneous part of the Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax 1 In these extracts () signifies that something found in text seems better away; [ ] that something wanting in text has been conjecturally supplied. 2 Thickets. 8 This Alexandrine is not common, and is probably a mere oversight. and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or in various combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain of alternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet, while between them various stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to be ranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as English poetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almost indigenous "eights and sixes" into fourteener lines and into alternate fourteeners and Alexandrines seems to have commended itself even more to contemporary taste, and, as we have seen and shall see, it was eagerly followed for more than half a century. But it was not destined to succeed. These long lines, unless very sparingly used, or with the ground-foot changed from the iambus to the anapast or the trochee, are not in keeping with the genius of English poetry, as even the great examples of Chapman's Homer and the Polyolbion may be said to have shown once for all. In the hands, moreover, of the poets of this particular time, whether they were printed at length or cut up into eights and sixes, they had an almost irresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble which is inexpressibly monotonEven when the spur of a really poetical inspiration excites this amble into something more fiery (the best example existing is probably Southwell's wonderful "Burning Babe "), the sensitive ear feels that there is constant danger of a relapse, and at the worst the thing becomes mere doggerel. Yet for about a quarter of a century these overgrown lines held the field in verse and drama alike, and the encouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefits which Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the Miscellany conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, in the blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above all, the sonnet. ous. It remains to say something of the matter as distinguished from the form of this poetry, and for once the form is of hardly superior importance to the matter. It is a question of some interest, though unfortunately one wholly incapable of solution, whether the change in the character of poetical thought and theme which Wyatt and Surrey wrought was accidental, and consequent merely on their choice of models, and especially of Petrarch, or essential and deliberate. If it was accidental, there is no greater accident in the history of literature. The absence of the personal note in mediæval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been more marked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey English poetry became at a bound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most "introspective" in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, but its convention had been a convention of impersonality. It now became exactly the reverse. The lover sang less his joys than his sorrows, and he tried to express those sorrows and their effect on him in the most personal way he could. Although allegory still retained a strong hold on the national taste, and was yet to receive its greatest poetical expression in The Faërie Queene, it was allegory of quite a different kind from that which in the Roman de la Rose had taken Europe captive, and had since dominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in the department of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled before the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a common form—a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost language-disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear his rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinite diversity of circumstance and feeling which the life of the actual man affords, instead of reducing everything to the moods and forms of an already generalised and allegorised experience. With the new |