INTRODUCTION. THE ENGLISH LYRIC OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.1 I. In the Introduction to Å Book of Elizabethan Lyrics I have said that "not the least merit of Elizabethan literature, defining both words strictly, is its soundness and its health; its very lapses from decorum are those of childhood, and its extravagances those of youth and heated blood, both as far as possible removed from the cold cynicism, the doubt of man and God, that crept into England in the train of King James, and came in time to chill and benumb the pulses of the nation." This statement I believe to be strictly and literally true, though it may here need some explanation. There was both crime and wickedness in Elizabeth's day; there was virtue and nobility of life in the days of James. But a cleavage between art and morals had come about early in the seventeenth century, if indeed not before; the Renaissance, now somewhat spent and losing in freshness and virility, threw off its former alliance with the rude but wholesome ethical spirit which animated the drama during the lifetime of 1 The reader is referred to the earlier paragraphs of the Introduction to the editor's A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics for a general discussion of the nature and limitations of the term lyric. 2 p. xxxvii. Shakespeare, and contracted from a broad humanitarian love of art as an imitation of the whole range of human action and emotion into the narrower, if choicer, spirit of the dilettante, whose taste in trifles is perfect, whose joy is not a little in the skill and cleverness of the artist, whose range for art, in a word, is contracted within the limits of good society. On the other hand, the moral aspect of the world was not lost, although it seemed all but lost to literature for a time. Any statement that the complex of moral, religious, and political agencies which is loosely called Puritanism was an unmixed evil to literature is wide of the truth. The marvellously rich devotional poetry of the period, a poetry which knew no sect and existed the common possession of Romanist, Churchman, and Dissenter, is alone a sufficient refutation of such an opinion. Still that spirit which translated the joys of the world into vanities and (denounced the most innocent show of human emotion as (the lust of the flesh and the temptation of the devil withdrew itself apart and lived alone in later forms of Puritanism, which became stern and austere, unmollified by grace and unsweetened with charity. Nothing could better illustrate the essential relation which exists in art between truth and that typical presentation of nature which we somewhat inaccurately call beauty, than the history of English poetry in the seventeenth century, especially the history of the lyric, always that form of poetry most sensitive to the subtler influences of an age. Moreover, whatever fastidious literary taste may prefer, the student of literature must beware of generalizations formed on anything short of a consideration of all the literary phenomena at hand. Perversions of art have their lesson for the historian of literature, and must be considered if the picture is to be true. Thus we must recognize, not only the rhetorical and "metaphysical" excesses of lesser and later Donnians, but the extraordinary stripping off of the gauds and ornaments. of poetic diction which marks the work of Wither when he leaves the praises of Fair Virtue to sing hymns of diviner praise. No less must we take into account that one of the most remarkable and artistically perfect poems of Carew is unquotable to-day; whilst it was not a mere following of the 3 bad example which his master, Jonson, had set him in translating some of the more objectionable epigrams of Martial, which has given us, in Herrick, a garden of the Hesperides foul in places with the filth of the kennel. These things are not wholly to be laid to the score of coarse or unrestrained manners. The root of the matter is in this separation of the ethical from the æsthetic principle, a separation which produced in the one case the moral, but for the most part unillumined, verses of Quarles and Wither, and, in the other (with much that was an aberration from both ethical and æsthetic. ideals), the perfect Hedonistic lyrics of Carew and Herrick, which exist for their beauty and for their beauty alone. To consider the cult of beauty as a new thing in the poetry of any period would be as absurd as to assume, by the extension of a doctrine attributed by Walter Bagehot to Ulrici, a concealed and deadly moral purpose for each and every poem of the earlier age.1 But if we will turn to the poetry of Spenser, Jonson, Donne, and Shakespeare we shall find it informed with an element of truth, whether half concealed in allegory, didactically paraded, intellectually subtilized, or set forth in an unerring justness of conception as to the dramatic relations of men to men. This we do not find in nearly an equal degree in the poetry of the succeeding age, and the ideals of such a poet as Carew — to take the most successful of his class - become much the same as those of the school which in our own day has given rise to the phrase "art for art's sake," a school accompanying 1 Shakespeare, Literary Studies, I, 169. whose æsthetic posturings we sooner or later behold the cynical leer of satire. Take the following: If when the sun at noon displays His brighter rays, Thou but appear, He then, all pale with shame and fear, Quencheth his light, Hides his dark brow, flies from thy sight And grows more dim Compared to thee than stars to him. The darkness flies, and light is hurled So as alike thou driv'st away Both light and darkness, night and day.1 This is beautiful and fanciful poetry. It is hyperbolic to a degree, so much so that we feel it to be no more than a figure of gallantry, the charming and perfectly expressed compliment of a courtly gentleman to a high-born and radiant beauty. In a poem of this kind we are not concerned with the truth; indeed the truth might perhaps spoil the effect. There is nothing new in the idea, but the artist has daintily set it like a gem in the filigree of a carefully considered comparison. Romeo, under the quickening influence of a new and all-consuming passion, forged the same thought into a pregnant metaphor: What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she.2 1 Poems of Thomas Carew, reprint of ed. 1640, Edinburgh, 1824, p. 8. 2 ii. 2. 2. The hyperbole of Romeo is justified by the overwrought emotion of the moment; it stirs in the hearer a sympathy with the lover's passion. The hyperbole of Carew is no less justified, for it, too, arrives at its purpose, which is no more than to amuse. There is about it, from its very extravagance, a suspicion of delicate raillery, which becomes certain when the poet leaves us at the end with a charming paradox. She would have been but an unsophisticated maiden at court who could have taken such a fine compliment from the king's cupbearer to figure forth anything more than "How pretty you're looking this morning, my dear!" "The artifice and machinery of rhetoric," says De Quincey, "furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure as any other; that the pleasure is of an inferior order, can no more attaint the idea or model of the composition, than it can impeach the excellence of an epigram that it is not a tragedy. Every species of composition is to be tried by its own laws."1 The much-vaunted test of comparison, by which Byron set beside Keats or Shelley appears tawdry or uninspired, is often preposterously misleading. There are reds that "kill" each other, though each may be beautiful apart; the mood in which to read Horace may not be precisely the mood for Catullus. In the seventeenth century lyric and its overflow into the occasional verse of the day we have neither the universality of Shakespeare, the scope and majesty of Milton, nor the consummate constructive, if conventionalized, art of Dryden and Pope; and '. yet there are some of us who feel that we could no more spare the dainty grace and beauty of Corinna's Going A-Maying than we could endure to lose a book of Paradise Lost. To critics of the nature of William Hazlitt, in those unlucid intervals in which his prejudices stood all on end, such poets as Carew or Suckling are "delicate court triflers" and noth 1 Rhetoric, Historical Essays, II, 229. |