The Professor was the first to speak. "I have often thought," he said, "that just as the links of the famous apostolical succession have often been upborne by some unworthy and incapable chain-bearers, so is it with the poetical succession. And yet, despite the imperfections and unworthiness of its highpriests, true poetry, like true religion, has never quite deserted the earth. It has always happened to both that when they had nearly died out because of the imbecility or the infidelity to their trust of those in whose keeping they had been placed, some glorious spirit has come upon the stage who has fanned the dying embers into a living flame, and whose genius has set the world aglow once more. Ah! it was a long and cheerless night, unblessed by a single brightly beaming star, the century and more between Chaucer and Surrey. It is true, John Lydgate (A.D. 1375-1462), James the First of Scotland (A.D. 13951437), and a few other lesser lights glimmered faintly during its earlier hours, but the darkness that followed their setting was almost profound; and the after-period between Surrey and Sidney was only less dreary. If we except those whom I have named, and a few others, the poets of the nearly two centuries that elapsed between Chaucer's last and Sidney's or Spenser's first productions were wretched poetasters, whose verse was 'weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,' and whose names may indeed find a place in anthologies, but are of interest to poetical antiquarians only." "Of how long duration was this later period, between Surrey and Sidney, of which you speak?" "Some thirty years or more. Surrey died in 1547; and the earliest published productions of Sidney and Spenser made their appearance in 1579. The period covered Henry the Eighth's latest, worst, most brutal, and most murderous years, ·Pioneers of English Poesy. 43 the six years of Edward the Sixth's brief boy-kingship, and the five years of unhappy Mary's encrimsoned and still briefer reign." "Am I to understand, Professor, that this thirty years of gloomy twilight was unillumined by a single ray of real poetical genius, or that during it England produced no great poet whose works men will not willingly let die?" "It is undoubtedly true that, generally, the poetry of these thirty years was a dismal travesty upon the name. Mostly, it was wearisomely verbose, dull to the verge of stupidity, overlaid with trivial conceits or tumid exaggerations, and its phraseology was puerile when it was not pedantic. There were versifiers in abundance; but there was no man of genius among them, who, like Chaucer before and Shakespeare afterward, was, as is the case with every true poet, in advance not only of his own but of every age. No, in all that period, which I prefer to style a tardy dawn rather than a gloomy twilight, there was no great or true poet in England." "Your verdict is a sweeping one, and it prompts me to ask, Did these men, then, render no service to our poetical literature ?" "That is an altogether different matter, my friend. Nevertheless, I reply without hesitation that, notwithstanding their inferiority, the poets of that day did render large and substantial service to English poesy; for they were the industrious and enterprising pioneers of the new thought and the new literature that was to burst into glorious bloom in the reign of Elizabeth. They cleared away the rubbish and underbrush that impeded the way, exposed its tangles and pitfalls, and by patient labor expended on sterile spots of soil they marked out what was unproductive, and to be avoided by those who came after, and led them to dig in 'fresh fields and pastures new.' They encountered difficulty with incommensurate means for overcoming it, and by their very failures developed, polished, enriched, and tested the powers of our language. No, most emphatically no; badly as they wrote, they did not write in vain." "You excite my curiosity to know something more of this advance guard of our modern poetry. Tell me of some of the more notable among them." They are soon told, my friend. There was John Heywood, called in his day, by way of distinction, the epigrammatist. He was court-jester to Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary, and has the credit of having been the first writer of English comedy, and among the first of our dramatists who drove the Bible from the stage, and introduced representations of familiar life and manners in its stead; but his poetry was sad stuff. Then there was Sir Francis Bryan, a writer of passionate songs and sonnets, in which, after the fashion of that day, he bewailed and bemoaned the perplexities of love; and his friend, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, brother of Anne Boleyn, who was the idol of the ladies of the court of his bloody-minded brother-inlaw and murderer, and who has left some songs and sonnets that sparkle with a certain grace and vivacity. And then we have good Thomas Tusser, an honest, homely, but desperately long-winded rhymer, whose 'Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry' is a literary curiosity, remarkable for its quaint common-sense, its copious collection of contemporary saws and proverbs, and its faithful presentation of the rural customs, habits, and pursuits of his day. To this period also belong George Gascoigne, author of the first prose comedy in our language, and of the second of our tragedies in blank-verse; and Lindsay and Buckhurst. 45 Sternhold and Hopkins, whose metrical version of the Psalms so long held the undisputed supremacy in the psalmody of the Church of England; and Sir David Lindsay, the Scottish poet, who was remarkable for the facility and elegance of the versification of several of his poems, as also for the dignity and beauty of many of his descriptive passages, but who dwells in my mind chiefly because of some quaint lines of his, in which he makes it a principal enjoyment of the righteous in heaven to see the torments of the damned, thus: They sall rejoysis to se the great dolour Of dampnit folk in Hell, and thair torment Greater than all the rest, however, was Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. He was eminent as a statesman, and it was his misfortune late in life to act as one of the commissioners who tried Mary Queen of Scots, to communicate her sentence to her, and to be present at her execution. His poems, especially his 'Mirror for Magistrates' and his tragedy of 'Gorboduc,' have great merits his verse being flowing, musical, and freighted with fine thoughts; his style lofty, and his allegory so rich and imaginative as to have been thought worthy of imitation by Spenser, who addressed a sonnet to him, prefixed to the 'Faerie Queene,' in which his verse is styled 'golden,' and 'worthy of immortal fame.' Besides this, with his friend, Thomas Norton, he was joint author of our first regular tragedy. Last of all, and least worthy, was Henry the Eighth himself, who diversified the brief intervals of his studies in polemical divinity and queen-killing, by trying his 'prentice hand on poetry. That he did so with indifferent success is rendered probable by the silence of contemporary flatterers, and by the fact that all that he wrote found a grave in the shortest of short memories. All that we really know of it is told in few words by Thomas Warton,* when he says, 'I have been told that the late Lord Eglintoun had a genuine book of manuscript sonnets written by King Henry the Eighth.' I might name half a score or more of these honorable toilers of that age, some of whom showed occasional sparkles of grace and vigor; but for the most part they are chiefly remarkable for having maintained with wonderful success the dead level of prosaic flatness." To come back to the sonnet, Professor, did any of these forgotten worthies write sonnets ?" "My dear fellow, they wrote them by the cord, on the smallest provocation; but, like those of Henry the Eighth, they have nearly all been hidden away in unremembered corners. Let them rest. We will not stir the dust of centuries that has settled upon them, but piously leaving them to their silent repose, will turn from the dead to the living. Among these I class Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) and Edmund Spenser (1553– 1598), who first brought the sonnet to comparative perfection in our tongue, and exhibited its powers by more numerous examples than any of their immediate contemporaries, save only Shakespeare (1564-1616), who, strictly speaking, was a generation later than they. Which of the two, Sidney or Spenser, was the first cultivator of the sonnet, it is hard to decide. Spenser certainly wrote some verse, which he himself considered immature, prior to 1579, among which were translations of eleven sonnets of Bellay, the French Ovid, as early as 1569, and still extant; and a version of Petrarch's 'Visions' about * "History of English Poetry," vol. iii., section 21. |