f GREAT ENGLISH POETS JULIAN HILL ^ivun^Jw c 1 GREAT ENGLISH POETS UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME GREAT MUSICIANS BY ERNEST OLDMEADOW WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS G. W. JACOBS & Co. PHILADELPHIA Copyright: Fredk. Hollytr. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. After G. F. Watts, K.A. GREAT ENGLISH POETS BY JULIAN HILL WITH THIRTY-THREE ILLUSTRATIONS PHILADELPHIA G. W. JACOBS & CO. BLESSINGS BE WITH THEM AND ETERNAL PRAISE, WHO GAVE US NOBLER LOVES, AND NOBLER CARES THE POETS, WHO ON EARTH HAVE MADE US HEIRS OF TRUTH AND PURE DELIGHT BY HEAVENLY LAYS. WORDSWORTH {Personal Talk}. CONTENTS PAGE GEOFFREY CHAUCER . . . . . 17 EDMUND SPENSER 3 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE . -47 JOHN MILTON ....... 64 JOHN DRYDEN ....... 83 ALEXANDER POPE ...... 97 THOMAS GRAY . . . . IX 3 OLIVER GOLDSMITH ... . . 125 WILLIAM COWPER 141 THOMAS CHATTERTON . . . . 154 WILLIAM BLAKE 169 ROBERT BURNS . . . . . . .185 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH . . . .198 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE . . . -213 LORD BYRON 232 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ..... 248 JOHN KEATS 263 ALFRED TENNYSON . . . . .278 ROBERT BROWNING ...... 293 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LORD TKNNYSON . . \ Frontispiece After G. F. Watts, R.A. FACING PAGE THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS . . ' * 20 After Richard Corbould EDMUND SPENSER'S HOME, KILCOLMAN . . . 40 After William Ha-vell THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN . . . . 52 After W. Mulready, R,/l. QUEEN ELIZABETH AT THE GLOBE THEATRE . . 58 After David Scott THE DEATH OF JULIUS OESAR . . ^. 62 After J, L. Ge'rome MILTON DICTATING "PARADISE LOST" TO HIS DAUGHTERS 80 After A. Munkacy JOHN DRYDEN . . ... 86 After the portrait engraved by C. E. ffagttaff THE REJECTED POET . . . . 92 After W. P. Frith, R.A. POPE'S VILLA, TWICKENHAM . . ; . 100 From an old print STOKE POGIS CHURCH . . .118 From an old print ETON COLLEGE * . . . . 122 After J. D. Harding 8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 9 THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD . . . .128 After W. P. Frith, R.A. DR. JOHNSON READING "THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD". 132 After Sir John Gilbert, R.A. COWPER'S FAVOURITE SEAT AT EARTHAM . .148 After W. Harvey CHATTERTON'S HOLIDAY . . . . 156 After W. B. Morris THE DEATH OF CHATTERTON . . . .166 After Henry Wallis "THE LAMB" . . ... 172 From William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" "THE REUNION OF SOUL AND BODY" . . .180 A design by William Blake for Blair's " Grave" "TAM o' SHANTER" . . . . 190 After A. Cooper, R.A. THE MAUSOLEUM OF BURNS, DUMFRIES . . . 196 After W. H. Bartlett RYDAL MOUNT . . ... 206 After T. Creswick, R.A. RYDAL WATER AND GRASMERE . . .210 After G. Pickering THE CHURCH OF ST. MARY REDCLIFFE, BRISTOL . 218 After J. Varley VALETTA . . . . . 228 After Samuel Prout OLD BRISTOL . . ... 230 After W. H. Bartlett BYRON AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN . . . 240 After G. Sander* io LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS BYRON CONTEMPLATING ROME . . . 246 UJter W. Vestall, ^.^A. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY . . . .252 tAfter Miss ^Amelia Curran JOHN KEATS . . ... 264 *After W~tlliam Hilton, ^.^A. "ISABELLA" . . . 274 ^After W. Holman Hunt, R.tA. SIR GALAHAD . . *-'".' 284 *4fter G. F. Wat ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING . . . 296 From a crayon drawing made in 'Rpme in 1859, by Field Talfourd NOTE J\TINETEEN English poets are discussed in the following pages. The author makes haste to grant that, in an ideal treatment of the subject, the number would be either a little smaller or a great deal larger. Either Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Byron, would have to be excluded, or Collins, Thomson, Camp- bell, and a host of their peers admitted. But, even if the writing of an ideal book on the English poets were within the author's ability, such a work lies outside his present intention. This volume has been conceived in a homely spirit. The names of all the poets whose lives and worlds it describes are household words. It may be true that Chaucer and Spenser are better known by pictures of " The Canterbury Pilgrims " and " The FaSrie Queen " than by the poems themselves ; that Shakespeare and Milton are more praised than read ; that Dryden and Pope are generally neither read nor praised, but merely remembered ; that Goldsmiths " Traveller " and " The 12 NOTE Deserted Village " are l^ept alive mainly as school " Readers " ,- that Gray survives in a single poem ; that Chatterton is known not by his works but by his tife, and especially by his death ; that Co-vesper's fame is oddly supported on a few hymns and "John Gilpin " ; and that Shelley draws a larger audience by an earthly little album ditty than by his heavenly answer to the songs of the skylark. Nevertheless^ the nineteen poets hereinafter portrayed are^ each and every one of them^ poets upon whom^ for a medley of reasons^ the people have fastened immortality ; and, although the people are generally wrong about their contemporaries , they are generally right about their forerunners. Indeed^ when for generation after genera- tion it goes on sounding the same literary verdict^ the voice of the people is indeed the voice of God. But, although the nineteen poets of this booJ^ are the poets whom the people want to hear about, the author cannot hope that he has written down only such things as the people want to hear. La Roche- foucauld slily declared that most of us have sufficient fortitude to endure the miseries of others ; and, on this principle^ certain writers of poets' biographies have indulged themselves freely in the subtle joy of ex- NOTE 13 aggerating their heroes* hungering* and thir stings and shiverings. The nineteen chapters which follow this Note will show that, with the certain exception of the ill-starred Chatterton and the doubtful exception of the unworldly Bla^e, the great English poets either made, or had fair chances of making, all the money they needed. Sundry well-worn anecdotes have there- fore been excluded from these pages. Doubly untruth- ful, both as history and as criticism, their absence will not be deplored by a single sound-hearted reader. For surely it is good to tyiow that the poets who have be- queathed to us so much delight did not themselves fret and ache in perennial misery, singing, each and every one of them, with a lump in his throat. As for the critical passages of his nineteen chapters, the author has written them in the same spirit as the biographical. That is to say, he has tried to pay due homage to the poets' masterpieces without shutting his eyes to the weaknesses and dullnesses of their journey- work. He ta\es leave to add that not one of his few critical novelties has been introduced for novelty's sake. Outside a bald worJ^ of reference, it would be difficult to write of nineteen poets in particular with- out betraying one's bias as to poetry in general. 14 NOTE Accordingly it may be well to state, in words borrowed from Milton and Keats, that throughout this book the poems which are joys for ever are assumed to be only those poems which are simple, sensuous, impassioned things of beauty. In other words, the proud title of a great English poet is yielded only grudgingly in the following pages to such writers as have lacked that indefinable spirit of which Edmund Spenser received from the gods a double portion. Praise is stinted herein both to those who wrote their verses too pain- fully and to those who poured them out too glibly. Again, little enthusiasm is shown for those who have enriched English literature by precious thoughts in verse which had been as well or better uttered in prose. A great poet must have great things to say : but he must say them greatly and in a poet's fashion. Re-perusing English poetry on these lines, the author has not felt able, for instance, to applaud the attempts which are being made to revive the vogue of Byron. Nor has he, even after making the fullest allowance for changes and advances in poetical crafts- manship, succeeded in wholly maintaining his young admiration for Robert Browning. On the face of it all this may savour of bigotry and unprogressiveness ; NOTE 15 but the fact remains that the few Englishmen whose poetical fame is unquenchable have shared, without exception, Spenser s magical and haunting gift. Ab- stract definitions of poetry ', such as " the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions" carry one hardly an inch farther : for a definition of " exquisite" has still to be made. Challenged to declare what one means by true English poetry, one can only reply in the concrete and say, " / mean this line in Keats, this rhythm in Coleridge, this epithet or phrase or stanza in Milton, or Shakespeare^ or Bla^e." A few such glories of poesy have been noted in the following studies. It will be observed that an attempt has been made to treat the nineteen poets not only chronologically but as interlinked in a chain. It was originally intended to add very short studies of the more interesting minor poets, hanging them, so to speak, upon the main chain like seals and lockets and cameos : but space has com- pelled the holding over of these short studies for another volume. JULIAN HILL. Fclpham, Sussex. July, 1907. GEOFFREY CHAUCER "LJALF a millennium has worn away since the Father of English Poetry died. His birth dates back to the epoch which most people still think of and speak of as "the dark ages." Yet it is possible not only to redraw the main outlines of his life but even to fill in a score of intimate details. The spot where Chaucer was born can still be traced in Walbrook, where the South- Eastern Railway approaches Cannon Street. The spot where he died, once occupied by a comfort- able house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, is even more safe from oblivion ; for it has been ceiled in during four hundred years by the glorious vaults of King Henry the Seventh's Chapel. Chaucer drew his first breath about 1340, his last on an October day in 1400 ; and many a faded document survives to tell of his doings and sufferings, and goings and comings, B 17 i8 GREAT ENGLISH POETS and ups and downs during the three-score years of his life. We know the names and callings of his parents and grandparents. Again, in the house- hold accounts of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster, who had married a son of King Edward the Third, we can turn to more than one entry concerning clothes for young Geoffrey, who seems to have been a page in the princely train. Records abound of the offices which the poet filled, of the journeys he made, and of the moneys he received ; and, with all these side-lights upon the self-disclosure made in his works, Chaucer stands before us as a living and breathing man rather than as a misty shape moving vaguely in the dim beginnings of literary history. It is a pity that Chaucer is still frequently neglected by lovers of poetry through the mistaken belief that his poems, so far as the modern reader is concerned, are written in a dead language. Through timidity or indolence many people still take Shakespeare as the start- ing-point of English literature, protesting that even Spenser is too archaic for their understand- ing or their enjoyment. Such slackness is hardly GEOFFREY CHAUCER 19 consistent. Admirers of Robert Browning, the poet who frankly stated that he "did not write poetry for an idle man as a substitute for a cigar," willingly exercise their brains in order to follow their idol's twists and turns of thought ; admirers of Burns cheerfully learn a sufficiency of the eighteenth-century Scots in which all his noteworthy poems were written ; and admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's ballads, including gently-bred ladies, have not disdained a little instruction in Cockney slang. Yet the same people grudge the same amount of time and trouble to Chaucer. Probably they over-estimate the difficulties of Middle English. Let them face the task and they will find it neither hard nor dry ; for, after a few prime facts and rules have been firmly grasped, they can plunge at once into Chaucer's greatest poem as their best and easiest text-book. Although William Cowper wrote many re- spectable verses after drinking nothing stronger than dishes of tea, and although certain living bards are reputed to find inspiration in black brews of mere coffee, there has always been a friendship between poetry and wine. Chaucer 20 GREAT ENGLISH POETS was the son of a vintner. He must have learned something of his father's trade ; for in the Canterbury Tales he mentions the very wines we drink to-day the wines of Bordeaux and of Spain and betrays a knowledge of the mysteries of blending. He was born in the midst of wine ; and wine and he never parted company. Thus, in 1374, King Edward granted him a pitcher of wine a day for life ; and, although in the fourteenth century the Poet Laureateship with its perquisite of a butt of wine had not been invented, it is known that, in 1398, a tun of wine was bestowed upon Chaucer by Richard the Second. And it is not a far-fetched suggestion that a childhood spent among the hogsheads and leather bottles of his father's shop was one source of the jollity and openness of mind so characteristic of his works. Unlike the poets of a hundred years ago, who deliberately sought exciting adventures in foreign climes as part of their poetical training, the youth Chaucer had adventures thrust upon him. He was hardly out of his teens before he found himself a prisoner in the hands of the French. King Edward, however, not only gave 16 a.f 63 "- GEOFFREY CHAUCER 21 towards his ransom, but eventually took him into his own service. But not as Court poet. As a valet of the royal chamber, the young man's duties included such unlyrical tasks as making the bed. Nevertheless the atmosphere of the Court was not illiterate. Although there were a hundred years to run before the invention of printing, MS. copies of new books circulated throughout Christendom in large numbers and with surprising rapidity. Everybody at King Edward's Court was reading or listening to the Norman-French Roman de la Rose, and there is little doubt that an abridged English version of this curiously compounded work was one of Chaucer's earliest attempts in literature. But Norman-French was nearing the end of its domination in England. After a battle three centuries long, the English tongue was once more becoming the language of the nation. A year or two before Chaucer entered the King's service, Parliament had been opened with a speech in English, and the time was ripe for the founding of a national school of poetry. In our own days, when nations are growing 22 GREAT ENGLISH POETS self-conscious, it is sometimes claimed that the moment has come for some particular race to establish or revive its truly national music, or literature, or painting. " Movements " are set going : and they generally come to a dead halt, for the simple reason that the Hour has arrived without the Man. But, in the fourteenth century, the man was at hand ; and Chaucer made his epoch as much as his epoch made Chaucer. Among people who never read him, there is a curious notion that Chaucer was merely a teller of stories in verse, telling a tale simply for the tale's sake. There can be no greater error. He was as fastidious a literary artist as Tennyson, and the first of his great English poems, The Book of the Duchess, is as far as possible from the ballad-maker's rudeness. If the poets of France and Italy had been able to read it, they would have been forced to admit that they had a brother and an equal in England. And this is why Chaucer is justly honoured as the Father of English poetry not merely because his work is truly English, but because it is truly poetry as well. By the time he began The Book of the Duchess, GEOFFREY CHAUCER 23 Chaucer had ceased to make beds and had risen to be a " royal squire." He was sent abroad on diplomatic missions, and is supposed to have met Petrarch in Italy. Every genuine poet who visits Italy comes back more of a poet for his journey ; and Chaucer was no exception. No doubt he would hear much talk of Boccaccio and his "Decameron": and Boccaccio's happy notion of setting a band of people to tell stories may have suggested to Chaucer the band of motley pilgrims taking turns to tell the Canterbury Tales. This, however, is not to say that the Englishman was the Italian's imitator or inferior ; for, on the contrary, Chaucer's plan is larger and his execution is marked by a dramatic development and unity of which Boccaccio did not dream. Not every poet has had the good luck to be a poet pure and simple a poet by profession. Just as Burns was a farmer and an exciseman, Chaucer, at the time when he was near his poetical best, was called to waste his years as Comptroller of the Customs and " Subsidy of Wools, Skins and Leather " for the Port of London. Unlike the famous sinecure of " Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland " 24 GREAT ENGLISH POETS enjoyed by Wordsworth, Chaucer's duty could not be done by deputy and he was forced to grind through his routine work in person. He has left us this unfading little picture of the poof- city man or clerk who longs all day for the evening hour when he will exchange the ledger for " another book " on themes higher than merchandise and money : . . . when thy labour done all is, And hast y-made reckonings, Instead of rest and newe things Thou go'st home to thy house anon And there, as dumb as any stone, Thou sittest at another book. Again, he confesses that he used to read until he became dazed. His was the robust originality which is not afraid to expose itself to the influences of other minds ; and he enriched the future of poetry by not disdaining the present and the past. But he knew where books should end and where thought and feeling should begin : and Londoners remembered him as " a large man with an elvish look " who walked staring on the ground " as if he would find a hare." When May came, he protests that no book could GEOFFREY CHAUCER 25 detain him from the singing birds and the springing flowers : and he spoke finely of Nature as " the vicar of the Almighty Lord." Irksome though his official duties were, never- theless they were an indispensable training for the grand work of his life. No mere literary man shut up among books could have written the Canterbury Tales. Had the Tales been finished, they would have formed the completest picture of the end of the Middle Ages ever painted ; and it was necessary that their author should gather materials by living a great deal of varied life. His frequent journeys on political errands threw him among all kinds of scenery and all kinds of people. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was an engineer as well as an artist : and, after he had ceased to be Comptroller of Customs, he received two shillings a day (equal, in purchasing power, to twenty shillings in the twentieth century) as Clerk of the Works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. He was also appointed to supervise the mending of the banks of the Thames. Hence it came to pass that he knew the crude thoughts of navvies as well as he knew the tortuous diplomacy of kings : with the result that 26 GREAT ENGLISH POETS his masterpiece is broad and human instead of being, like so many of the works of his contem- poraries, narrow and merely aristocratic. Books, solitary thought, bustling and varied life all these elements in the making of a poet were abundantly granted to Chaucer. But it does not appear that he was fortunate in obtain- ing the poet's crowning endowment of love. The matter is obscure : but, if his own words mean anything, he endured eight years of unrequited affection. It is also believed that his marriage was unhappy : but this conjecture may be groundless, and, although sundry lines in his poems seem to lend it support, it is quite credible that Chaucer belonged to the large class of husbands who make joking complaint of their servitude and misery while in truth they are snugly happy. In any case it is certain that Chaucer was a proud and affectionate father, as appears from the prose Treatise on the Astrolabe which he wrote for his little son, Lewis. Five hundred years have failed to evaporate the sweetness from the opening words of the Treatise. It begins : " Little Lowis, my son, I have perceived wel by cer- GEOFFREY CHAUCER 27 teyne evidences thyn abilitie to lerne sciencez touching noumbres and proporciouns." Of course the Treatise is no longer of scientific value : but there is still something to be learned from it as regards the true spirit and method of conveying truth to a childish mind. Under King Richard the Second, Chaucer enjoyed many favours. He even sat in Parlia- ment as a knight of the shire for Kent. He stood well with the Queen, Anne of Bohemia, and must have been almost a rich man. Despite innumerable grants and pensions he contrived, however, to taste of that frequently recurring impecuniosity in which so many of the English poets have faithfully imitated their father and master. It stands in black and white that he often anticipated his pension by coaxing for a little bit on account ; that he pledged the said pension to two money-lenders ; and that he was sued by some irreverent creditor for ^14. is. lid. On the accession of King Henry the Fourth, Chaucer was ready and waiting, primed with the MS. of a still extant poem known as The Compleint of Chaucer to His Empty Purse: and before the new monarch had reigned four days 28 GREAT ENGLISH POETS he responded by doubling the complainant's pension. It follows that true poverty, like true love, cannot be confidently reckoned among the forces which compelled this poet to produce his poems. The two greatest and most ambitious of Chaucer's works are both unfinished. The first of these, the Legend of Good Women^ is remark- able not only for its contents but for its point of view. Chaucer's " good women " are not the saints and virgins of the ecclesiastical calendar : they are Cleopatra, " the Martyr Queen of Egypt " ; Thisbe, " the Martyr of Babylon " ; Dido, Alcestis, Ariadne, Lucretia. That the sprightly Cleopatra was both a good woman and a martyr is a little staggering at first sight even in our degenerate day : but Chaucer's test of his good women seems to have been their fidelity to romantic love. This alone would suffice to prove that they are wrong who neglect Chaucer as the poet of a dead world. He belongs far less to the Middle Ages than to the Renaissance. As for the Canterbury Tales, they have steadily waxed in renown throughout five centuries and they are trebly sure of immortality. To the GEOFFREY CHAUCER 29 historian who cares for human facts more than for mere names and dates they are among the most precious of documents ; to the genuine philologist they are eloquent with the birth-cries of the noblest literary language ever written or spoken ; and to the simple lover of poetry they are beyond price as the legacy of one who was the first of our great poets in the order of time and only second to Shakespeare in the order of merit. It is true that there were Anglo-Saxon poets before Chaucer just as there were brave men before Agamemnon. But the gems discoverable among the relics of these early bards are so few and far between that only the literary antiquary has the time and patience to find them. In Chaucer the beauties throng as thickly as the flowers in a June garden ; and one might almost as well close one's eyes to the crisp greenness of an English spring as close one's ears, as so many do, to the bright music of Chaucer's verses. EDMUND SPENSER a surpassingly great poet it may be said that he is all things to all men. As they read his verses, lovers sound deeper depths of love, warriors hunger and thirst more keenly for danger. To commune with the spirit of the greatest poets is to drink so deeply of a magic draught that, thenceforward, every one who has dipped his cup in the fountain walks under a grander sun and under a softer moon. But the poets who are so great as to be universal in their appeal are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand with a finger or two to spare. Speaking generally, a poet speaks warmly to one sex, or to one class, or to one race, or to one time of life, leaving his other readers cold. For examples, Homer is a man's poet ; Byron, when he is serious, is a youth's poet. And there have been women's poets, young ladies' poets, scholars' poets, 30 EDMUND SPENSER 31 courtiers' poets, sweethearts' poets, and, indeed, a poet for every sort and condition of man. Edmund Spenser is one of these class bards : but he sings to the proudest class of them all, for his fame is secure as "The Poets' Poet." Even if the rank and file who read him so little ceased to read him altogether, he would still be able to claim a kind of indirect universality, for he would remain one of the living forces of English literature, working through generation after generation of poets who will always turn to him for example and for delight. Curious discoveries reward the investigator who goes up and down with his ears wide open : and the writer of these pages has found by experiment that many otherwise intelligent people relegate Spenser to a dusty shelf in the lumber- room or old curiosity-shop of poetry in the belief that he was merely a later and slighter Chaucer telling a tiresome tale in obsolete and ill-spelt English. Such people would do well to take a pencil and a scrap of paper and to work out one or two very easy sums. Among other enlighten- ing results they would find that there is as great an interval of years between Chaucer and Spenser 32 GREAT ENGLISH POETS as there is between Milton and Mr. Swinburne, or between Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Further, Chaucer was bred in the age of faith, amid the unity of Western Christendom, whereas Spenser was bred an inquiring Protestant amid the Elizabethan atmosphere which began to make England an island in the matter of national ideals and temperament as well as in geographical position. It is true that the two centuries which divide Chaucer from Spenser had been barren of great poets and great poetry : but it is false to assume that Spenser simply took poetry up where Chaucer laid it down. The Faerie Queen is not a belated instalment, with new scenes and personages, of The Canterbury Tales on the to-be- continued-in-our-next principle. It is a new thing, animated by a new spirit. For a long time it was believed that Spenser was born in the year 1553 : but most of his re- cent biographers have altered the date to 1552 on the strength of the following lines in a sonnet ad- dressed to the Irish maid whom the poet married in 1594 : . . . one year is spent The which doth longer unto me appear Than all those forty which my life outwent. EDMUND SPENSER 33 But, seriously, this is shaky ground on which to base a revision of the traditional date. Poetic licence would surely justify Spenser in writing the round number " forty " instead of trying to cram into the rigid limits of his sonnet the more unmanageable syllables of the prosaically exact " thirty-nine." When biographers go about their work in so literal a fashion one is tempted to wish that only poets should be allowed to write other poets' lives. Like Chaucer, Spenser was born in London : but he was at pains to assert a relationship with the Spencers of Althorp, whose noble line has persisted down to our own days. Seeing that the times were lax as regards the spelling of names, it is difficult to understand why Spenser did not strengthen his pretensions by changing his London "s" for the Althorp "c." But young Edmund's entrance into life was made humbly. From Merchant Taylors', his school, (where a record exists concerning two yards of cloth for a funeral gown given to Edmund Spenser,) he went in 1569, as a poor scholar, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Spenser remained at Cambridge until 1576, 34 GREAT ENGLISH POETS when he took his Master's degree. But it does not appear that he became a genuinely learned man. His works are rife with inaccuracies, some of which, unlike Shakespeare's, offend the reader. For example, the last line of the noble fragment on Mutabilitie in many respects the most deeply thought and loftily expressed of all his writings is spoilt by what is either an ill-placed pun or a piece of ignorance. Spenser exclaims : O, Sabaoth's God, grant me that Sabbath's sight ! as though " Sabaoth's God " that is to say, " the God of Hosts " is an interchangeable expression for "Sabbath's God" that is to say, the God who ordained the Sabbath, or seventh day, of rest. But, although he did not become minutely learned, the poor scholar made good friends at Cambridge, notably Gabriel Harvey. There is fairly conclusive evidence that in 1569, between school and university, Spenser had been employed, as a nameless hack, to translate certain poems of Petrarch ; and it was clearly understood by Harvey and his circle that the young man had literary intentions. They believed, however, in common with Sir Philip Sidney, who eventually EDMUND SPENSER 35 became Spenser's patron, that the way of salvation for English poetry ran through un-English regions. That is to say, they preached the imitation of Italian models, denounced " bar- barous rymes," and tried to impose artificial laws of quantity upon vernacular poets. In his Areopagus, Sidney taught these evil doctrines with so much enthusiasm that, for a time, Spenser fell into heresy and wrote worthless verses in the Italian style under the affected and exotic name of " Immerito." Mists hang over Spenser's whereabouts and doings soon after his departure from Cambridge. But the mists serve to make more magical the one sure fact which beams through them. During an absence, for some purpose unknown, some- where or other in the north of England, Spenser fell magnificently in love. His beloved, a mysterious Rosalind, " the widow's daughter of the glen," paid him compliments but refused him her hand. A great deal of poetry sprang from the affair ; and the fidelity with which Spenser claimed to adore her memory almost to the end of his days seems to have been something better than literary affectation. 36 GREAT ENGLISH POETS Returning to the south, the despairing lover tried to mend his heart not only with the price- less friendship of Sidney but also with the smiles of another lady. To his friends, who knew all about the hard-hearted Rosalind in the north, he was so wholly unabashed in calling the new beauty his " corculum " which is very ugly Latin for " sweetheart " that Harvey responded by hailing her as " altera Rosalindula " which is nimble Latin but clumsy gallantry and as " mea bellissima Colina Clouta." " Colina Clouta," of course, is a playful femin- ine form of Colin Clout, the bucolic name assumed by Spenser for the purposes of his first consider- able poem, The Shepherd's Calendar. The Calendar appeared in 1580. For prudential reasons the poet's name was not on the title-page : for the text contained a chivalrous mention of Spenser's old patron, Bishop Grindal (thinly dissembled as Algrind), who had fallen into disfavour at Court. Instead of Spenser's name, the book bore the initials " E. K," which stood for Edward Kirke, who introduced the poem in glowing language. The Calendar was suggested by the agricultural and astrological almanacs which were the fore- EDMUND SPENSER 37 runners of " Old Moore." It contains twelve poems, one for each month in the year, and is as good as Spenser could make it, considering that he still felt bound to swaddle an English work in classical clothes and also to conform to the affectation which turned the whole world into a pastoral scene and made shepherds and shepherd- esses of all the men and women in it. The Calendar was well received ; and although its authorship was not certainly known by every- body, Spenser had good reasons for expecting rewards at Court or in the public service. For a time he lived in daily hope of a mission to France. But the Fates willed that he should imagine the bloody emprises of his faerie knights among wilder and darker scenes ; and he was dispatched with Lord Grey, of Wilton, to Ireland. Whatever may be his views as to the measures which ought to be adopted in the future, every fair-minded student is compelled to admit the historical fact that, whether through English mis- government or through Irish obstinacy, Ireland has truly been for hundreds of years " the most distressful country that ever yet was seen." In 38 GREAT ENGLISH POETS the notes on Ireland which Spenser left in MS. at his death occurs this remarkable passage : Marry, soe there have been divers good plottes and wise counsells cast allready about reformation of that realme ; but they say it is the fatall desteny of that land that noe purposes, whatsoever are meant for her good, will prosper or take good effect ; which, whether it proceede from the very Genius of the soyle, or influence of the starres, or that Allmighty God hath not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiett state still for some secret scourdge which shall by her come unto England, it is hard to be knowen but yet much to be feared. The " unquiett state " in which Grey, as Lord Deputy, and Spenser, as his secretary, found the Isle of Saints was mainly due to the rebellion under the Earl of Desmond. In its own turn, Desmond's rebellion was largely due to the pouring of the oil of religious controversy upon the ever-smouldering Irish hatred of English rule. The struggle was to the death on both sides, as Spenser saw with his own eyes. On the one hand he was probably present at the defeat of Glenmalure when the English fell into a deadly ambush ; while, on the other hand, he seems to have assisted at Lord Grey's capture of the fort of Smerwick, and at the cold-blooded EDMUND SPENSER 39 massacre of the hundreds of brave Spaniards and Irishmen who had formed its garrison. In such times men did not go to Ireland for pleasure, and Spenser must not be too severely blamed for having looked after himself whenever there was a division of spoil. When the Planta- tion of Munster was in course of arrange- ment, Spenser was admitted as an " undertaker," a word which needs some explanation. As a result of the long unsparing conflict, vast tracts in Munster had been so completely desolated that one might ride over them all day without seeing a cultivated acre or a standing roof-tree or a domestic animal. Munster was accordingly mapped out into " seignories " of from three thousand to twelve thousand acres each, and these seignories were assigned on alluring terms to personages in England on condition that they should re-populate Munster with English farmers and labourers. Of course the scheme failed, and Munster and Connaught, the two provinces against which the generals of Elizabeth and of the Commonwealth launched their most relentless severity, are still the two hardest nuts the British Government has to crack. But, for 40 GREAT ENGLISH POETS a time, the plantation promised to succeed ; and when Spenser " undertook " to assist he received three thousand acres lying round Kilcolman, a ruined house of the Desmonds, under the Galtee Hills, between Mallow and Limerick. Kilcol- man is dreary enough nowadays : but in 1586, when Spenser entered into possession, its dream- ing lake and tumbling waters and old-grown trees made it something better than the worst of homes for a poet. Indeed, placed as it was in the midst of the fightings and alarums, it is hard to imagine a more fitting spot than lonely, perilous Kilcolman for the writing of a broad, slowly- moving poem of knightly adventure like The Faerie Queen. What had become of the poor "corculum," the " bellissima Colina Clouta," nobody knows. It has been suggested that Spenser married her : but beyond the fact that he ought to have done so, there is no indication that he did. Apparently Spenser dwelt solitarily in the wilds, building up The Faerie Queen line by line, stanza by stanza, canto by canto, book by book. He had begun the poem about 1580, before he sailed for Ireland, and in spite of Harvey's solemn entreaties to go on Italianizing and to let "the elvish queen" alone. EDMUND SPENSER 41 Upon Spenser's solitude, in 1589, broke one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived a man whose life is more crowded with excitements than the lives of all the great English poets put together. This man was Sir Walter Ralegh. It was the year after the defeat of the Armada, and although the Ark Ralegh had borne the admiral's flag against the Spaniard, he was in disgrace. Ralegh was visiting his Irish seignory with some money-making plan of supplying Irish pipe-staves for the French and Spanish wine-trade : but in the course of his journey he made the greatest discovery of his adventurous life. He discovered The Faerie Queen. Perhaps it would be too much to say that The FaSrie Queen might have been lost to the world if Ralegh, who was as great a critic as he was a soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, had not perused it at Kilcolman. Still the risk was great. With- out Ralegh's praise and friendly pressure, it is conceivable that Spenser would have worked on in the hope of finishing his poem and that it would have perished in the sack and burning of Kilcolman in 1598. What actually happened was that Spenser came immediately to London with the first three books of the Queen, and that 42 GREAT ENGLISH POETS this first instalment was published in 1590. And on one point at least Ralegh's importance in the affair is beyond dispute. It was at his instance that Spenser furnished the key to the poem at the outset, although he had intended only to give it in the twelfth book, which he never lived to write. On his own confession, Spenser's poem is an ethical allegory. He imagined a " faerie queen " who, on the twelve successive days of her annual festival, sent twelve knights on twelve adven- tures. Each knight was intended to embody some manly virtue : and by imagining these twelve virtues summed up in one hero the reader would compose a picture of the ideal knight or of the perfect Christian gentleman. Although The Fae'rie Queen as we have it to- day that is to say, the three books published in 1590, the three books published in 1596, and the fragments of a seventh book found after Spenser's death is so long that the man who has read it straight through is regarded as a literary prodigy, only about one-fourth of the projected work was executed. Nevertheless the poet wrote quite as much as his allegory would stand. It is full of pictures and full of music : but it is out of touch EDMUND SPENSER 43 with life, like the still longer romances of chivalry which Cervantes was slashing to pieces by his satire in Spain at the very moment when Spenser was sedulously re-embroidering them in Ireland. For poets, The Fae'rie Queen will abide an ever- green, enchanted, melodious wood ; but it has never been and never will be a seashore or a mountain-top where plain men and women may soothe or stir up their souls. Like Horace and Ovid, Spenser knew that he had compassed immortality. Here is the dedica- tion of his work : _ To The Most High, Mightie, & Magnificent Empresse Renowned for piety, virtue & all gratious government ELIZABETH By the Grace of God Queene of England, Fraunce & Ireland, & of Virginia, Defendour of the Faith, &c. Her most humble servant Edmund Spenser Doth, in all humilitie, Dedicate, present & consecrate These his labours To live with the Eternitie of Her Fame. As every reader of the poem knows, The Faerie Queen abounds in that overblown adulation of 44 GREAT ENGLISH POETS Elizabeth which the Queen exacted on every hand. But, in Spenser's case, the flattery did not fail of its mark : for Gloriana, as he had named the virgin monarch, awarded him a pension of ^50 a year, to the disgust of the Lord Treasurer. The publication of The Faerie Queen evoked more praise than could have been expected by any one save the poet himself. Even the classical Harvey was so far converted as to write a laudatory poem ; and Spenser, after a stay of a year and a half in England, returned home to pen the account of all he had seen in London known as Colin Clout's Come Home Again. But he was not wholly a flattering time-server : and therefore he dealt with the seamy side of Elizabeth's Court in a further poem called Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox. As a man of forty, Spenser found a wife at last. Although the " planters " of Munster were forbidden to marry with the Irishry, his bride was a daughter of the soil, though probably of a family which had bowed to the English yoke. Like the Rosalind of seventeen years before, at first she repelled her wooer, who seems to have EDMUND SPENSER 45 written of love in others' lives better than he could practise it in his own. But she surrendered in the long run : and it was in her honour that Spenser wrote not only his Amoretti sonnets but also the superb Epithalamium with its grand lines : Open the temple gates unto my love ! Open them wide that she may enter in, And all the postes adorne as doth behove, And all the pillows deck with girlands trim, For to receive this Saynt with honour dew That cometh in to you. With trembling steps and humble reverence, She cometh in before th' Almightie's vew. Of her, ye virgins, learne obedience, When so ye come into those holy places To humble your proud faces. Bring her up to th' high altar, that she may The sacred ceremonies there partake, The which do endlesse matrimony make ; And let the roring Organs loudly play The praises of the Lord in lively notes ; The whiles, with hollow throates, The Choristers the joyous antheme sing, That all the woods may answer and their echo ring. Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes, And blesseth her with his two happy hands, How the red roses flush up in her cheekes, And the pure snow, with goodly vermill stayne, 46 GREAT ENGLISH POETS Like crimson dyde in grane ; That even the Angels, which continually About the sacred altare doe remaine Forget their service and about her fly, Ofte peeping in her face that seems more fayre The more they on it stare. But he had waited long for what was to be short happiness. Within five years of his marriage, Kilcolman was destroyed and Spenser was dead. We know that two sons were born to him whom he named Sylvanus and Peregrine, meaning " Woodman " and " Pilgrim." We know that he published three more books of The Faerie Queen, and Four Hymns on Love and Beauty ', Earthly and Heavenly. We know that he was designated Sheriff of Cork. The rest is horror. Under a new Earl of Desmond, the Irish in 1598 wrought vengeance upon stolen Kilcolman. Spenser escaped to England, a ruined man, and died the following year in Westminster. According to Ben Jonson, " he died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused twenty pieces sent him by my Lord of Essex saying he had not time to spend them." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE greatest poet who ever put pen to paper, either in England or out of it, lived in health and strength for two-and-fifty years. During half his life he was hard at work upon so many writings that a closely-printed volume of a thousand pages hardly contains them all. Yet he died having published only two tiny volumes of verse which can be perused in an hour. It is true that pirates, during the poet's lifetime, printed copies of all his sonnets and faulty editions of some of his plays : but the fact remains that, even in our poet-scorning twentieth century, many a callow youth has published more verses than William Shakespeare published all the days of his industrious life. And if the reader will keep this fact clearly in mind, he will find that he has the key to nearly all the major Shakespearean puzzles. 47 48 GREAT ENGLISH POETS Shakespeare was conscious of his greatness. In one of the Sonnets he wrote : Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. And yet, after he abandoned poetry pure and simple in favour of the poetic drama, he ceased to take himself seriously as an English poet. The printer, the bookseller, and, in one sense, the reviewer were already well-established institutions of which his little brother-poets were taking full advantage : but Shakespeare was content to forgo them all and to fling his pearls before a small houseful of play-goers, many of whom cracked nuts during the poetical passages and shuffled impatiently for the clown. Not until their author's bones had lain for seven years in the chancel of Stratford Church did the plays of Shakespeare attain to the dignity of lawful print. In 1623 his fellow-actors and literary executors, Heminge and Condell, put forward the famous " First Folio," which has become so precious that millionaires will offer for a copy of it almost as much as they would pay for a race-horse or a second-rate steam-yacht. It is probable that, in correcting some of the plays, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 49 Heminge and Condell had access to the original MSS. and to Shakespeare's own revision of the quarto editions which had been put together by hasty transcribers of the stage copies or by shorthand writers who had attended the performances on the pirates' behalf. But although Heminge and Condell seem to have done their best, the text of Shakespeare has come down to us more battered and maimed than many a writing of the days before the invention of printing. Saving a few printer's errors, we have the precise words of Spenser, a slightly earlier and immeasurably smaller poet. But a thousand perplexities beset the pages of Shake- speare, ranging from such small matters as the spelling of an equivocal word to such huge questions as whether Shakespeare had anything whatever to do with a particular speech, or scene, or act, or even a whole play. The truth is that Shakespeare did not write, like the book-poets, to be printed and to be read. He wrote to be declaimed and to be heard. No doubt some hope or plan of printing in the long run hovered round his mind : but the slackness or procrastination which ultimately 50 GREAT ENGLISH POETS handed the task over to Heminge and Condell is proof of what has just been said that Shake- speare did not consciously place himself in the bright succession of Chaucer and Spenser, and that he did not foresee the verdict of posterity which would acclaim him, simply as an English poet, high above them both. If a prophet had whispered in his ear that while his works, as stage-plays, would become a trial to the majority of candid mankind, his glory as a poet would outflame all other glories, ancient and modern ; that his birthplace would be vis,ited and guarded like a holy place ; and that cartloads of commen- taries would be written round his works as if they were an inspired writ if a prophet had whispered all this, what would Shakespeare have answered ? No one knows. But as good an answer as any other is this : that Shakespeare, in his last years, attained to so calm a greatness of soul that his head would not have been turned ; that he would have reduced the works which bear his name by one-half; that he would have applied to the remainder the unfailing artistry which marks the two little books he deliberately published ; and that the gains of such a self-conscious WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 51 revision would have outweighed the heavy losses. All these might-have-beens, however, have only been indulged in because they suggest the temper in which Shakespeare's superabundant writings may best be read. They suggest that Shakespeare's plays ought to be read, as they were written, rapidly and eagerly, and that there is no irreverence in recognizing the plain truth that they contain thousands of lines which the world could easily do without. The reader who loiters idolatrously round every phrase loses the whole in the parts, and cannot see the wood for the trees, the flowers, the nettles, and the dead branches. In Shakespeare's case, even dates refuse to be dry. Both his birth and his death occurred on the 23rd of April ; and the 23rd of April is the feast of St. George, the patron saint of England. The birth-year was 1564, under the last of the Tudors ; the death-year was 1 6 1 6 under the first of the Stuarts. Shakespeare's father (butcher, glover, and wool-merchant) does not appear to have been a native of Stratford-on-Avon : but, having chosen 52 GREAT ENGLISH POETS it for his home, at first he prospered in it greatly. He became ale taster, constable, affeeror, chamberlain, alderman, justice of the peace, and high bailiff of the town. He won the hand of a small heiress, with the pretty home-grown name of Mary Arden, who was able to trace her pedigree straight back to King Alfred. William Shakespeare, Mary Arden's son, is not for a nation but for all mankind, just as he is " not of an age but for all time." Nevertheless, Englishmen have the principal part and lot in him : and it is stirring to remember that the most English of poets, who lay new-born and new- dead on the feast of England's saint, was the direct descendant of England's greatest and most English king. Even if John Shakespeare had foreknown the future of his son he could not have given him a more serviceable education. At Stratford Gram- mar School the boys were not taught too much ; and plenty of leisure seems to have been available for learning lessons quite as useful as Latin in the streets of the town and in the Forest of Arden and along the banks of the Avon. Hence it came to pass that although the lad grew up WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 53 with a habit of never reading Virgil or Ovid in the original when a translation was handy, he also grew up with an all-round knowledge of the chase, of falconry, and of rural sights and sounds. And the sequel justified Dr. Johnson's dictum that " the knowledge of nature is half the task of a poet." A respectable tradition declares that, after ceasing to be a pupil, Shakespeare became a schoolmaster. It is also said that he understood butchering, and that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech." But these are unsure traditions. The only certain fact about Shakespeare's youth in Stratford is the painful one of his marriage, under a sort of compulsion, with Anne Hathaway. The bridegroom was eighteen and the bride twenty-six. The wedding seems to have taken place without the knowledge of Shakespeare's parents ; and it is a sombre fact that the creator of Juliet, of Ophelia, of Perdita, of Portia, of Viola, was paired for the remaining thirty-four years of his life with a mate to whom he had been drawn by the least noble instinct of his nature. Six months after his marriage a 54 GREAT ENGLISH POETS daughter, Susanna, was born. Twins, a boy and a girl, named Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585. Hamnet died in boyhood. Susanna and Judith married respectively a physician and a vintner. But, with the death of Susanna's child, Shakespeare's line came to a full stop ; and the poet who had taught in the Sonnets that one can only defy the enemy Time by living over and over again in one's children and children's children was beaten after all. While his twin babes were still in their cradles, a mysterious event drove Shakespeare out of his native town. The present-day traveller who asks the Stratford-on-Avon gamin who Shake- speare was and what he did generally receives the delightful answer that Shakespeare was " the man that stole the deer " ; and, although the story is rejected by a few modern sceptics, the weight of evidence is on the gamin's side. Less than a hundred years after Shakespeare's death, Rowe, echoing the words of Betterton who had talked with old acquaintances of Shakespeare's daughters on the spot, published the tale in his Account of the Life, etc., of Mr. William Shakespear. Shakespeare, he says, had aided and abetted WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 55 others in poaching on the preserves of Sir Thomas Lucy, the principal landowner of Stratford ; and, after being prosecuted, had added insult to injury by poking fun at the plaintiff in comic verses. The end of the affair was a hasty flight out of the wrathful squire's jurisdiction. Making his way to London, the fugitive is reported to have kept his soul in his body by accepting " mean employment." According to a Stratford parish-clerk who was born before the poet died, Shakespeare " was received into the play-house as a servitor," and a more explicit but suspectable tradition boldly declares that it was his duty to stand in the street holding the horses of the theatre's patrons while they were inside. In any case it is beyond dispute that he was soon in touch with playgoers and players. In these days, when an actor- manager is often a " Sir " in England and an " Excellency " in Germany, it is important to remember that the players of Shakespeare's time were still rogues and vagabonds in the eyes of the law, and that they gave their performances in the fields beyond the walls of London simply because the City 56 GREAT ENGLISH POETS Fathers had driven them out. During Shake- speare's childhood at Stratford, his father as High Bailiff of the town had encouraged the visits of strolling players and had paid them sums of money : but, strictly speaking, actors were still outlaws. Here is one of the most startling facts in the history of any literature. The two centuries following on the death of Chaucer had been almost blank : the work of Spenser was courtly, literary, and for the few ; and, altogether, poetry in England was generations behind poetry in Italy. Yet, in a single reign, English poetry became the most splendid and vital in the world ; and it was perfected out of the mouths of rogues and vagabonds. It was as though the music- hall " artists " of our own times should suddenly desist from trying to make the English language brutal and ugly and should put into everybody's mouth ballads and lyrics all aglow with such poetic fire as to make the glorious outburst of English poetry which began with Blake and Coleridge seem thin and cold. The running of the same play for hundreds of nights a practice which stales our actors and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 57 deadens our drama was unknown under Queen Elizabeth. Hence there was a brisk demand for new works or for old ones re-furbished ; and there can be little doubt that Shakespeare's first task as a playwright was to overhaul the thread- bare plays in the repertory, slashing and patching and re-embroidering until they were made modish and bright. As early as 1592 Greene, one of Shakespeare's predecessors in dramatic poetry, spat words of jealousy at his young rival, calling him An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you : and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country. The weak or dull or silly or confused plays, or parts of plays, which put so severe a strain on the patience and reverence of Shakespeare's readers, are probably the work of third-rate men whose hemp has become entangled with Shake- speare's silk. At the beginning of his literary career he seems to have added good work to others' bad ; at the end, others seem to have added bad work to Shakespeare's good. 53 GREAT ENGLISH POETS It has been suggested that the downright badness of some of the earlier plays is explained by the fact that Shakespeare was learning his trade as a writer and that he necessarily bungled. No doubt he made long strides of technical improvement, and there is as wide a stretch between Shakespeare the beginner and Shake- speare the mature dramatic poet, as there is between Shakespeare in mid-career and Shake- speare's astonishing fore-runner, Christopher Marlowe. But at no stage was Shakespeare bungler enough to perpetrate the worst things which bear his name. In proof of this it is enough to point to his two small books of poetry, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published as early as 1593 and 1594. These poems have been blamed on many grounds : but no one worth listening to has ever said that they are the fumblings of a beginner. Both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece versify passionate and tragical stories. But Shakespeare's treatment is remote, decorative, cold. Hazlitt, numbed by this coldness, has compared the two poems with two ice-houses. It would be more just to say that they are like 2 Q a v WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 59 two cold stone temples, consecrated the one to Profane and the other to Sacred Love, and that their two legends, the legend of baulked passion and the legend of outraged chastity, are figured there with all the rich colouring of church windows and with all the glassy chilliness as well. But the point to note is that, from first to last, they are finished with the masterly craft of an accomplished poet. Venus and Adonis was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton ; and, from the patronage of an earl, the poet went quickly on to enjoy the favour of the highest in the land. As an actor he appeared before the' Queen at the palace of Greenwich, and, as a poet, it is known that he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor to please Elizabeth who had expressed a wish " to see FalstafF in love." Shakespeare seems to have been in equally good odour with James the First ; for the Puritan reaction against the theatre had still to make itself strongly felt. Nor was his popularity with nobles and monarchs an empty honour. It is said that the Earl of Southampton gave him ^1000 "to enable him to go through with a purchase which he had a 60 GREAT ENGLISH POETS mind to " ; and the dedication of the First Folio shows that the earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery had also given solid proofs of their enthusiasm. Indeed, Mr. Sidney Lee has calculated that, after 1599, Shakespeare's income was equal to ^5000 a year of our money. It is probable that he hastened to the relief of his father, whose fortunes had sadly declined. For a time he visited Stratford only once a year ; but, having bought New Palace, the best house in the town, he spent his last days almost entirely on his estates and supplied the stage with two plays every year. Of his intimate life in London nearly all the hints that remain are will-o'-the-wisps. The beautiful youth and the dark woman who move through the sonnets are believed by some readers to have been mere literary pegs on which to hang verses, while others more reasonably main- tain that they were of solid flesh and red blood and that they helped to deepen in Shakespeare's soul the gloom which broods over King Lear and his greater tragedies. Into the depths of blank pessimism and atheism Shakespeare never descends : but to contrast his early tragedy WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 61 Romeo and Juliet with King Lear is to obtain an awful glimpse of his march into the dark. But the end was peaceful and golden, like a sunset. Once he had shaken London's dust from his feet and settled down among sweet fields and green forests, Shakespeare's spirit emerged from the dark valley at the upper end. For a long time it was the custom of editors to divide his works into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies : but modern criticism is happily preferring a fourfold division and is placing the kindly works of Shakespeare's last period in the category of Romances. The Romances include such works as The Winters Tale and The Tempest: and perhaps it is because he wrote them with his daughters at his side that they are abrim with a tender reverence for young love. Shakespeare died in 1616. Some say his death was due to bad drains, and others that it followed upon a bout of drinking : but, although he was only fifty-two years old, his work was done. The gold which remains when one has purged the dross from his achievement is so abundant 62 GREAT ENGLISH POETS and so resplendent that it takes away one's breath. Laughter and tears, love and hate, day and night, summer and winter, kings and clowns, town and country, peace and war with these and with all other great opposites he is at home, and his unwearied spirit has ranged over all the tracts between. It is Shakespeare who wrote, almost casually, of "the dark backward and abysm of time"; and yet the same Shakespeare could be so direct and simple that, at the climax of their tragedy, he is content to let Iras speak to Cleopatra in words of one syllable, saying : . . . The bright day is done, And we are for the dark. Shakespeare held the mirror his magic mirror up to nature in a sense of which the modern realist does not dream. Shakespeare is true to life : but so searchingly and poetically true that he gives us life as life would be if life were true to itself. In the world which he discovers women laugh more brightly and weep more softly while men love more grandly and hate more vilely than in the anaemic world of every-day fact. At Shake- speare's call, kings wax into kings indeed ; and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 63 even the arch-king, the king of terrors, Death, awes and hushes us more solemnly because, though it be unconsciously, we look with Shake- speare's eyes at his sable mantle and moon-red crown. JOHN MILTON TPHY soul," cried Wordsworth, invoking Milton, " was like a star and dwelt apart." The words are true in a sense other than Words- worth's own. Shakespeare fires us like the sun : Spenser beams upon us like the moon : but Milton's pure cold ray seems to reach us from outside our solar system, through gulfs im- measurable and void. It must be admitted that this chilliness of Milton is not generally recognized and that there are many people by whom it would be hotly denied. Interpreting him as they do by those stirring utterances on Liberty which made Wordsworth exclaim Milton ! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee, his admirers take it for granted that Milton's blood raced in and out of a warm and generous 64 JOHN MILTON 65 heart. Again, recalling his justly famous dogma that poetry should be " simple, sensuous, passionate," they assume that the dogmatist himself was a simple, sensuous, passionate, elemental child of nature. The harsh truth is that in his championship of Liberty, Milton was an opportunist pleading for himself and his party ; and that the simplicity, sensuousness, and passionateness of his poetry are nearly all due to the fine taste and self-conscious effort of a fastidious and industrious scholar who, although he was certainly not the greatest of English poets, was probably the greatest of English men of letters. John Milton's father was a scrivener and a precisian lean and shivery words both. But he was of sound yeoman stock : and, in spite of his Puritanism, he showed a taste in music which re-appears in the long-drawn melodies and organ-like harmonies of his son's greater poems. For Milton's father was better than a musical dabbler. A composition of his was deemed worthy of a place in The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Souk, along with numbers by such men as Orlando Gibbons and 66 GREAT ENGLISH POETS John Bull, and even William Byrd. Indeed, only a few weeks before the publication of the present volume, a London music-publisher has found it worth while to reprint, on its musical merits, a madrigal which the father of Milton contributed to The Triumphs of Oriana, in praise of Queen Elizabeth. The boy John was born on 9th December, 1608, at the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. In modern England such picturesque signs and bravely-sounding names as the Spread Eagle and the Golden Lion and the Black Horse have been left almost entirely to inns and drinking-bars : but, under James the First, the name simply meant that the scriptorium of Milton's father was reckoned as a shop. In this case there was nothing in a name. The spread-eagle spirit was alien to the yea-and-nay Puritan household over whose door the imperious bird extended his gilded wings. From grammar schools and private masters the lad passed on to a Nonconformist school in Essex, where his dignity as a budding bard was so little understood that the matron cut his poet's locks as short as a convict's. At the JOHN MILTON 67 age of twelve he found himself at St. Paul's School under a headmaster who, although he " had his whipping fits," managed to push and coax his pupil a long way up the steep slope of classical learning. Milton himself declared in after life that he scarcely ever went from his lessons to his bed before mid- night. Oddly enough, the youth's earliest poetical exercise is still his most widely known. For every person in the world who reads poetry as such, there are fifty honest, illiterate persons who treasure the mixed contents of their hymn- books on non-poetical grounds. There are thousands of places in the English-speaking world where no one could be found to recite a pair of lines from Lycidas or Comus : but there is hardly a hamlet where somebody does not know the hymn Let us, with a gladsome mind, Praise the Lord, for He is kind. At the time of his paraphrasing this and another psalm Milton was only fifteen years old : but there are couplets in his version which clearly 68 GREAT ENGLISH POETS promise the fine and strong achievement of his manhood. For examples : Let us blaze His name abroad, For of Gods He is the God. Who by His wisdom did create The painted heavens so full of state. And large-limb'd Og He did subdue With all his over-hardy crew. At seventeen, Milton proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge the university of Dryden and Gray, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Byron and Tennyson. In 1625 Cambridge had hardly begun to differentiate herself from Oxford, and her atmosphere was as classical as her sister's. But the new undergraduate, who had acquired Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian before leaving home, sniffed at the hoary seat of learning disrespectfully. He came into conflict with his tutor, and is even said to have been flogged as well as sentenced to a short term of rustication. Nevertheless, he contrived to endure the prescribed seven years of residence. His contemporaries called him " Lady," because JOHN MILTON 69 of his good books and still better behaviour. But all efforts to woo him into the ministry of the Church failed. " He who would take orders," he said, " must subscribe slave." Horton, a typically English village in Buckinghamshire, had meanwhile become the family home on the retirement of Milton's father from business. It was a place of lush meadows and grand trees and abundant waters, with a glimpse of Windsor Castle to add the necessary touches of humanity and of art. Here, after he had done with Cambridge, the young scholar abode for five years. At first he was well content and confessed that he could call to witness the groves and rivers and the beloved village elms under which, in the last past summer, I remember having had supreme delight with the Muses, when I too, among rural scenes and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity. Five years later, however, he exclaimed, " Where I am now I live obscurely and in a cramped manner." He was weary of the fields and felt that he had accomplished little. Yet these cramped and obscure years gave birth to 7 GREAT ENGLISH POETS nearly all the poems by which Milton will stand shoulder to shoulder with Keats in the meagre ranks of the immortal English poets. Not until twenty years later did he begin Paradise Lost: but it is not upon Paradise Lost that Milton's fame will ultimately stand. Paradise Lost is an astonishingly sustained pageant of verse, just as the almost contemporary Pilgrim 's Progress is a wonderful procession of prose. But both these Puritan classics have been made to bulk up out of the true picture of English literature because, for a very long time, they were the principal poetical and imaginative reading of millions of excellent people whose consciences did not allow them to feast upon literature for literature's sake. By 1637, the year of his disenchantment with Horton, Milton had written the Ode on the Morning of the Nativity (1629), L* Allegro, and // Penseroso (1633), Comus (1634), and Lycidas (1637). The Authorized Version of the Bible was already twenty-five years old, and Milton accordingly has the advantage of being the first English poet who can speak to the modern Englishman in a tongue which does not call for JOHN MILTON 71 a glossary. The few archaisms which survive in his work help its effect by their lucid quaintness, as in these two fine endings of stanzas in the Nativity ode : . . . the mild ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. And all about the courtly stable Bright-harness'd angels sit in order serviceable. In the following lines of // Penseroso, Milton touched the high-water mark of reflective, decorative English poetry : But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof With antic pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight Casting a dim, religious light. There let the pealing organ blow To the full-voiced quire below, In service high and anthem clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all heaven before mine eyes. Comus was written to be performed as a masque on Michaelmas night, 1634, at Ludlow Castle : 72 GREAT ENGLISH POETS for the Roundheads had not yet seized power and banned theatrical entertainments. The splendid Lycidas, composed in 1637, was one of thirty-six elegies, most of them extremely bad, in which thirty-six poets bewailed the death of one Edward King who had been drowned on the way to Ireland. In the spring of 1638, Milton sailed for Italy, going to Rome by way of Paris, Nice, Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa. The Italians could not read his English poems : but they were not blind to the great merits of his Latin verses, and Milton has himself preserved the memory of a magnificent concert given by Cardinal Barberini, who himself waiting at the doors and seeking me out in so great a crowd, nay, almost laying hold of me by the hand, admitted me within in a truly most honourable manner. In Florence, Milton met Galileo, already blind, and unconsciously stored up a lesson of resigna- tion against the dark day of his own blindness. He also met Manso, the protector of Tasso, and confided to him his plan of an epic poem. In sunny, courtly Italy, Milton intended that his epic should treat of King Arthur : but, as every- JOHN MILTON 73 body knows, he altered his mind when he set to work under the dour Commonwealth and wrote " of Man's first disobedience " instead. The struggle between the King and the Parliament would have stung a warm-blooded poet to break out into his most impassioned verse : but poetical unrest was not congenial to the sumptuous deliberateness of Milton's verse- making. For eighteen years he was almost silent as a poet. It is true that he wrote the very earnest sonnet, beseeching the Royalists to pity a poor Parliament-man, which runs : Captain or Colonel or Knight in arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, ***** Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower. But Milton's literary labours, from the finishing of his Epitaphium Damonis in 1639 to the beginning of Paradise Lost about 1658, were restricted to the educating of his nephews and the writing of pamphlets and State-papers. Instead of giving the world an Arthurian poem, which would have been greater than Tennyson's, he turned loose five ecclesiastical pamphlets, one 74 GREAT ENGLISH POETS of which bore the engaging title Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnus. Roughly stated, Milton's belief was not in " a free Church in a free State," but in a civic order under which Church and State would be merely two aspects of one body. Like other Puritans he gazed longingly back to the theocracy of the Children of Israel which had ended under the prophet Samuel. The Church was to be the State, the State the Church ; and, to realize this ideal the Church was to be purged of bishops, and the State relieved of kings. As for the arguments in these pamphlets of Milton's they were admirably adapted to convince those readers who agreed with him already. The Civil War broke out in 1642. For sixteen years Milton had been receiving interest on a loan of ^500 which he or his father had made to an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell. The creditor was a Roundhead, the debtor a Cavalier. It has been suggested that, owing to the war, an instalment of interest became over- due : but this is no more than a guess. The certain fact is that at Whitsuntide, 1643, Milton mounted a horse and rode off through the JOHN MILTON 75 hawthorn and the buttercups to his debtor's house. There is something wrong with any man, be he chimney-sweep or poet, who reaches the age of thirty-five exactly half his three-score and ten without having fallen in love. When Milton set out for Oxfordshire, he was in his thirty-fifth year : and, although he had paid a Latin compliment or two in Italy, love seemed to have passed him by. Unhappily marriage does not always mean love : and the amazing marriage of Milton involved love on neither side. Within a month of his departure from town, he was back among his astonished house- hold in Aldersgate Street with a bride Mary Powell, the daughter of his debtor, a girl of seventeen. The husband, who was almost old enough to be her father, seems to have chilled and repelled the poor child from the outset. Milton's nephew, Phillips, who lived with the pair and knew all about it, says : By that time she had for a month or thereabouts led a philosophical life (after having been used to a great house and much company and joviality), her friends, possibly incited by her own desire, made 76 GREAT ENGLISH POETS earnest suit by letters to have her company the remaining part of the summer, which was granted on condition of her return at the time appointed, Michaelmas or thereabouts. Michaelmas being come and no news of his wife's return he sent for her by letter, and receiving no answer sent several other letters which were also unanswered, so that at last he despatched down a foot-messenger : but the messenger came back without an answer. He thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse. Phillips goes on to state that it was this bad faith at Michaelmas which goaded Milton into writing his two tracts on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. But Masson, the poet's best biographer, has discovered that the true story is more painful still. He has shown that the first of the tracts on divorce was written in July, only a month after the wedding. To shatter generous illusions is sorry work. But the truth must be told. And the truth is that the bright fountains of Milton's pleas for Liberty are poisoned at their source by opportunism and self-interest. He championed divorce in general because he wished to be rid of Mary Powell in particular. As for his famous Areopagitica^ the best of all his prose JOHN MILTON 77 writings, this eloquent appeal for the Freedom of the Press was evoked by the disfavour with which the Presbyterian censorship looked at its author's own tracts on divorce. In troublous times, when the greater swallows up the less, too much must not be made of the inconsistencies of public men : but, when all due allowances have been made, it remains a blot on Milton's fame that, within seven years of writing his Areopagitica, he became himself a paid censor ; and also that, when he was himself profiting by toleration under the restored Stuarts, one of his latest writings was directed against the extension of toleration to a body whose religious tenets he did not approve. For two years the truant bride remained in Oxfordshire without either side holding out the smallest sprig of olive. Meanwhile Milton's school was enlarged and his old father came to keep the deserted husband company. Apparently the champion of divorce was prepared to practise what he preached : for he began openly courting Miss Davis, " a very witty and handsome gentle- woman." But the guns at Naseby happily blew the witty and handsome gentlewoman's chance 78 GREAT ENGLISH POETS away. King Charles was finally beaten : and, a month or so later, Mary reappeared " making submission and begging pardon on her knees." It is a bright and honourable page in Milton's life which records how he was reconciled with the runaway even to the extent of giving shelter to her family after the fall of Oxford the following year. Oxford surrendered in June ; and in July Milton's eldest daughter was born. After the beheading of the King, which Milton supported, the poet's progress in worldly pros- perity was rapid. At a salary equal to ^900 a year of our money, he acted as Latin secretary in Cromwell's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and also as censor of the Press. He enjoyed the use of a suite of rooms in Whitehall Palace. When the immense success of the mysterious book Eikon Basitike began to cause a reaction in the dead King's favour, it was Milton who was deputed by the nervous Council of State to write Eikonoklastes in answer. Again, when the learned Salmasius denounced the regicides, it was Milton who made the official retort. Un- fortunately the retort fell below the dignity of JOHN MILTON 79 the occasion. For example, to taunt Salmasius with enduring a shrewish wife was hardly an argument for cutting off the head of a king. But personalities are livelier than logic, and accordingly Milton's pamphlet had an immense popular success. In March, 1652, darkness sealed the poet's eyes. By this time three more children had been born to him : and, in the following May, his wife died. It was out of the depths of these griefs that Milton uttered the noble and beautiful sonnet On His Blindness, With Oliver Cromwell John Milton stood well. Coadjutors were appointed, and he retained his official post. In 1656, he married Katherine Woodcock, " a captain's daughter " ; but both Katherine and her babe died in 1658. Two years later came the Restoration, and Milton went into hiding in Bartholomew Close, Smith- field. But the only vengeance pronounced against him was the public burning of his books against Charles the First : and, with a reduced but still ample income, the ex-Secretary to the Commonwealth was able to live out his remain- ing fourteen years in safety and in comfort. 8o GREAT ENGLISH POETS During the Plague he dwelt at Chalfont St. Giles, where his cottage still stands. Paradise Lost was begun in 1658 and ended in 1663. For years after dropping the idea of King Arthur the poet had been casting about for a subject and had wavered among ninety-nine themes, of which sixty-one were Scriptural and thirty-eight legendary or historical. He also hesitated between the dramatic and the epic forms before he decided upon a didactic epic " to justify the ways of God to man." The poem was dictated to his younger daughters, who were often aroused in the dead of night to write down the new-made lines. The relations of Milton with these poor scribes of his own flesh and blood make wretched reading. Despite his tract on Education, the eldest daughter was not taught even to write her name. The others were trained to read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew aloud ; but beyond pronounc- ing the sounds, they had no suspicion of their meaning. When Milton died, he left his daughters nothing, on the ground that he had done enough for them already. Turning to the other side, it is said that the girls hated their JOHN MILTON 81 father and that they sold off book after book from his library to a rag-wife for pocket-money. It is pleasant to know that Milton's third wife, a golden-haired Cheshire lass, thirty years his junior, whom he had married in 1663, resigned a portion of the estate to her step-daughters after a little pressure : and, also, that Deborah Milton was cared for in her old age by Johnson and Addison and the Princess Caroline, for poetry's sake. Paradise Lost was sold to Samuel Symmons in 1667 on terms which ensured to the author 5 for each of the first three impressions, an impression counting 1300 copies. Milton him- self received jio, and his widow sold her interest for. ^"8. In defence of Samuel Symmons it must be remembered that if a poet of the present day ventured to take to a publisher the MS. of an epic as good, as long, and as serious as Paradise Lost he would be shown the door. Despite its Arian doctrine, and despite the fact that Satan is the real hero of the epic, Paradise Lost was passed by the Archbishop's censor, a personage with the unepical name of Thomas Tomkyns, and it began to make its way in the world. As an example of Christian 7 82 GREAT ENGLISH POETS apologetics, its day has worn to twilight : but, for that very reason, its starry beauties are shining out more brightly. Among poets, there is not one who loves it : but, on the other hand, there is not one who does not respect it, marvel at it, and learn from it. Its music is nearly always as grand as the organ on which the blind poet played ; and, now and again, it is as sweet as the piping of birds. Considered technically, as a prolonged exercise in blank verse, it is one of the wonders of the poets' world. But it is not astir, as such an epic should be, with life life temporal and life eternal and it is not aglow with love love human and love divine. As for Paradise Regained, although Wordsworth and Coleridge ranked it above Paradise Lost, it is chillier and tamer still. In short, Mark Pattison's verdict on Paradise Lost as " the elaborate outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry " is a sound verdict, and " elaborate " is a good, a true and a good, word. Yet, in treating of its author, one cannot fairly close upon a grudging note. We may make vast reservations, and yet say of Milton, with Goethe, " He is very great." JOHN DRYDEN "QRYDEN found English of brick and left it of marble," said Dr. Johnson. The saying has been laughed at on the ground that the bricks included Hamlet and Othello monuments beside which the costliest of Dryden's marbles are of no more worth than a heap of cracked pots. Nevertheless Johnson spoke the truth. English as Dryden found it was not the English of Shakespeare : for the Puritan epoch had intervened, and Shakespeare's natural influence upon literature had been largely thwarted. It was not even the English of Milton ; for the warm and licentious Restor- ation had swamped the chilly decorum of the Commonwealth. Besides, when Dryden emerged as a full-fledged poet, Paradise Lost lay still unpublished and Milton's known poems did not overflow one slender volume. The English which held the field was, in the main, brick 83 84 GREAT ENGLISH POETS indeed rudely-shaped, half-baked clay, of the earth earthy. It is the glory of Dryden that he gripped our literary language when it was on the headlong road to degeneration and restored its form and comeliness and self-respect. Under Pope, Dryden's great disciple, it is true that poetry became so marble-stiff and marble-cold that it had to be snatched out of the flawless and crystal-clear and shining but death-dealing ice by the eager hands of Chatterton and Blake and Coleridge and the Romanticists. But the fact abides that Dryden saved our poetry and directed its course for a hundred years. We may be sorry that he and his successors sent the bright stream along channels as formal as Dutch canals : but, without Dryden's embankments, the flood would probably have leaked and oozed and spread over an evil swamp, and the century after Milton, like the century after Chaucer, would have been barren of poetry and fertile only in the rude songs and ballads of mere versifiers. Dryden was born at the vicarage of Aldwinkle All Saints, in Northamptonshire, on 9th August, 1631. His native house still stands : and from Aldwinkle village one can still look at a grand JOHN DRYDEN 85 cedar which was planted two years before the poet was born. The slow and fishful Nene, in which Dryden learned a love of angling which he never lost, flows through the wooded vale. Near at hand stood the mound of Fotheringhay : but Dryden never mentions either the castle or Mary Stuart in his poems, although he became poet-laureate to a Stuart King and died in dogged disapproval of William and Mary. Westminster School and Cambridge gave Dryden the education which he was to put to good account in his great version of the whole work of Virgil. But, like Milton, he failed to love Cambridge, as appears from the lines : Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university ; Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age. At Canons Ashby, in a delicious house which still belongs to the family, dwelt Honor Driden, daughter of Sir John Driden, the poet's uncle. To this cousin Honor who never married young John Dryden addressed an ardent and gallant epistle which is still in existence. It has been assumed that here was a tragedy of hopeless 86 GREAT ENGLISH POETS love on both sides, with the greedy and heartless Sir John in the role of the stern parent. The supposed suitor was already about twenty-four years old, and the fortune which had just fallen to him on the death of his father brought in an income of no more than ^200 at the present value of money. Again, Sir John was a thorough-going Parliamentarian, while his nephew, despite his Puritan parentage and his trimming Heroic Stanzas on the death of Cromwell, was probably all along a Royalist at the bottom of his heart. For either, or both, or neither of these reasons : or for some others ; or for none at all ; the ardent and gallant epistle proved to be a mere flash in the pan. With the baser sort of biographers it seems to have become a principle that every genuine English poet must have been short of money and unhappily married. Certain literary historians of the nineteenth century, led by the partisan Macaulay, have chosen to blacken the picture of Dryden's domestic life, and, on the strength (or weakness) of evidence on which one would not hang a dog, the widely-read John Richard Green has flung broadcast the deplorable statement, " Dryden's life was that of a libertine, and his JOHN DRYDEN. After the Portrait engraved by C. E. Wagstafi. JOHN DRYDEN 87 marriage with a woman who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his debaucheries." Dryden was married, at the end of the year 1663, to Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. The worst that is known against this " woman more dissolute than himself" is the fact that, before her marriage, she wrote a letter to the Earl of Chesterfield into which it is possible to read hints of a flirtation. After the marriage, she lived with her husband until his death thirty-seven years afterwards. Her three boys were well brought up and became men of religious mind ; and an ill-spelt but long and motherly postscript which she added to a letter written by Dryden to his sons breathes of domestic unity and goodwill. As for Dryden himself, the " debaucheries " hardly come up to expectations. The most frightful of them is his eating of tarts with a friend and " with Madam Reeve at the Mulberry Garden." Madam Reeve was a famous actress ; the friend appears to have been the manager, Southern ; and Dryden him- self, the third of the shameless tart-eaters, did practically nothing for fifteen years beyond 88 GREAT ENGLISH POETS writing stage-plays. If one is to brand Dryden as a libertine on such a ground as this, one must call every modern playwright who lunches after a rehearsal with an actor-manager and his leading lady an infamous wastrel unfit for decent society. It is necessary to go into this matter of Dryden's alleged vileness and dishonour because the defaming of his character has led to the neglect of his verse. The neglect of his plays is less regrettable ; because although they contain fine work, lyrical, dramatical, and purely poetical, they are defiled by the coarseness with which the Restoration playwrights, however estimable their private characters, thought it necessary to strew their writings. But the poetry is too dis- tinguished in itself and too far-reaching in its influence to be passed by. In the course of his long life, Dryden attempted almost all the known forms of poetical composition, and in none of them did he fail. And he is hardly ever tiresome. Too many of the great poets, like Words- worth in the Prelude^ have been great bores. But Dryden has as many points as couplets. His under-rated sEncid is easier to read through than The FaSrie Queen or Paradise Lost. JOHN DRYDEN 89 Astr