CHAPTERS
IN THE

HISTORY

OF ENGLISH

LITERATURE

CHAPTEES
IN THE

fflSTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
FEOM 1509 TO THE
CLOSE OF THE ELIZABETHAN

PEEIOD

BY

ELLEN CEOETS
LECTURER AT NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

EIVINGTONS
WATERLOO

PLACE,
MDCCCLXXXIV

LONDON

¥20,1

PREFACE.
IN these Chapters, which are founded on Lectures given
at Newnham College, I have tried to give a connected
view of the so-called Elizabethan period.
I hope that they may be a stimulus to the study of
the works of the writers of this time, and also that they
may serve as connecting links between the many excellent
works both of criticism and research which bear on the
period, and to which I have been so largely indebted.
NEWNHAM COLLEGE,

October 1883.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER

I.—INTRODUCTION.
PAGE

THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

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T H E RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND—BEGINNINGS OF T H O U G H T SCHOOL OF THE N E W LEARNING.

PART I.—Its Work in Religion

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PART II.—Its Work in Social and Political Criticism

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PART III.—Its Work in Education

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III.

T H E BEGINNINGS OF ART.

PART I.—Poetry—The Company of Courtly Makers

PART II.—Prose—Euphuism and beginnings of Art Criticism

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

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XIII.
PAGE

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN EELIGION

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ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE

CHAPTER
DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETEY .

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EKKATA.
Page 111, line 13, for Stgyian read Stygian.
,, 139, ,, 15, for accorded read recorded.
,, 139, ,, 41, for chain read chair.

HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE
DURING THE ELIZABETHAN PEEIOD.
CHAPTER I — INTRODUCTION.
THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
DANTE, b. 1265, d. 1321 ; PETRARCA, Francesco, b. 1304, d. 1374 ;

BOCCACCIO, Giovanni, b, 1313, d. 1375.

THERE was a deep and spiritual significance for the mediaeval
mind in the story of Faust. In order to enjoy the world, to
taste of its experience, Faust sells his soul to the devil; he gives
way to those cravings, the satisfaction of which, according to
mediaeval belief, must make him the victim of the powers of
evil. The legend, the story of his desires, of his temptation and
his fall, is truly typical of the struggle that went on in the
minds that hovered on the brink of that great movement of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,—a movement which is often too
exclusively, too narrowly, called the Renaissance, embracing as it
does that twofold revolt against the authority of the Church and
the intellectual despotism of the Schoolmen, the latter specially
aided and characterised by the revival of the classics. The later
mediaeval mind had in it the germs of revolt against the narrowed life of the Middle Ages; against the ascetic theory that
earthly life was but a pilgrimage, that here on earth there was
nothing but misery, suffering, and sacrifice in order to reach the
heavenly life and gain the heavenly crown, the one object of
human effort; that the cravings for earthly knowledge, earthly
enjoyment, were a deadly sin. But for long the ascetic theory
remained powerful, and the legend told the story of the man,
who, seeking to satisfy his earthly desires, was eternally lost.
Of the great movement, of which the legend contains an
early indication, there can be no adequate comprehension, unless
B

2

INTRODUCTION.

[CHAP. I.

we accept that view which regards it as a necessary phase, and
one of the most important phases, in the growth of the social
organism; we must look upon it as something external to the
great men who mark it by their names, as not produced by, but
as productive of men such as Dante, Luther, Petrarch, and
Erasmus: it was not the result but the cause of the discovery
of the New World, of America in 1492, of the Cape of Good
Hope in 1497, of the outburst of science, of the Copernican discoveries of the solar system in 1507. Hegel's theory of a worldspirit, Comte's of the historic growth of the civilised world
through ordered successive stages, Spencer's of the evolution of
the social organism, are all but various expressions of the great
truth that the history of society is the history of a natural
ordered growth; that there is a continuity in all the phases of
our politics, of our literature, of our social life; that each phase
is vitally dependent upon the other; that what we are apt to
consider as causes, as decisive changes, are but incidents in a
movement larger than themselves. The history of the Renaissance is " the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom
by the human spirit manifested in the European races;" it
resulted in what Michelet calls " the discovery of the world and
of m a n ; " it gave the impulse alike to science and to a r t ; it
made the Middle Ages seem dark and dreary in comparison to
its brilliant life.
It is with the Middle Ages that our modern European civilisation begins,—with the fall of the Roman Empire, or rather
with the absorption into the Roman Empire of the new fresh
force of barbarism. To civilise the strong barbaric individuality,
to make it capable of realising the social tie, was the problem to
be solved by earlier medigeval Europe; and the solution of this
problem is found in the history of the growth of the human
mind, politically and intellectually, and in the influences which
acted on it during these periods. Barbarism had to undergo a
severe discipline, and it was the great institution of the Middle
Ages, the Church, which administered the discipline. It was
the Church and its offspring, monasticism, which taught the allimportance of those qualities of self-denial, of self-sacrifice, of
unselfishness, which are the foundations of social union; the
recognition of which is the first jDrinciple essential to common
action, to that co-operation necessary to a great nation. During
the Middle Ages, the Church and monasticism inculcated these
principles, emphasizing them by the doctrine of contempt of self
and contempt of the world, by encouraging only those yearnings

CHAP. I.]

INTRODUCTION.

3

and aspirations after an infinite and eternal life beyond the grave.
These are the ages which have always been called Dark, because
during them no apparent advance was made either intellectually
or politically; and because the sense of the social tie, of duty and
relationship to others, could only be made an instinct by means
of a severe discipline, which, representing self-denial and selfrepression as the individual's best interest, checked all enterprise
and originality. " Man's life is a struggle, and heroism the only
excellence," was the strongest and highest sentiment of the
Teuton barbarian; and Christianity taught him that heroism was
the one excellence, because it showed scorn of suffering and
struggle here on earth in order to win a heavenly crown. But
the races of Europe, in receiving this discipline, which resulted
at first in such a barren life, made the first step towards a
civilisation grounded on a wider basis; they made the first
step towards reconciling that problem, the great one both of
individual and national life; they acquired the instincts necessary to the perfect social life; it remained to be seen whether
they would ever develop those of the perfect individual life. The
spirit of the Kenaissance was the imprisoned spirit of humanity
rebelling against the fetters that mediaeval life had forged for
it. The results of its rebellion, the Reformation in religion,
the Renaissance in literature, mark the downfall of the institutions of the Middle Ages, the climax of the revolt that had been
gradually growing against the authority of the Church and the
intellectual despotism of the Schoolmen, the substitution of
classic, sometimes of pagan ideals for those of monasticism and
asceticism, the reaction in favour of that free individual life
which had been held in such check during the Middle Ages.
Man may now enjoy life without fear that the Evil One shall
possess his soul.
First and foremost in this movement stands Italy,—first,
because chronologically she was the earliest to attain to that
belief in the dignity of man, in the indivisibility of the human
race, and to that, reverence for classic culture and classic ideals
which is so distinctive of the Eenaissance of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries; and secondly, she is foremost, because in her
these characteristics were developed to their fullest and greatest
extent; and because her political condition rendering her cosmopolitan instead of patriotic, she considered herself as bound to
spread the truth abroad through Europe—she considered that she
had a proselytising mission of culture and of art. Thus Italy is
important to us, from the secondary point of view, as influencing

4

INTRODUCTION.

[CHAP. I.

England. Between 1320 and the beginning of the sixteenth century, we can study clearly in Italy the characteristics of the great
movement. "We find there " the highest expression of belief in
man as a rational being apart from theological determinations,
which, together with a profound belief in and reverence for the
classics, constitutes the essence of humanism." "Then the
Supreme Maker," wrote Pico della Mirandola, " decreed that unto
man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should belong
in common whatsoever had been given to His other creatures.
Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and
having placed him in the centre of the world, spake to him thus :
* Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor
any gift peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam,
in order that what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt
choose, may be thine to have and to possess. The nature
allotted to all other creatures, within laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds,
according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed
thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the world, that thence thou mightst more conveniently
survey whatsoever is in the world. Nor have we made thee
either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that
thou being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst
fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt
have power to decline unto the lower or brute creatures. Thou
shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.' Thus to man, at his birth,
the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of
life."
And we find, too, that in Italy the reverence and affection
for the classic Past rose almost into a passion : it was not merely
a literary reverence—it was a feeling influencing political and
moral judgment. I t was thought that in the Greeks humanity
was seen at its perfection. Pius II. gave amnesty to the citizens
of Aretino because they were fellow-citizens of Cicero; Leonardo
Bruni writes : " The Greeks far excel us in humanity and gentleness of spirit." In knowledge of the classics, in culture, lay the
highest life. Only through study and learning was it possible
to bridge over the gulf between the ancient and the modern
world; only through them could one commune with the great
spirits and souls of antiquity; only in culture could be sought
immortality; only in bringing forth a work which should influence posterity could be gained that eternity of life denied to

CHAP. I.]

INTRODUCTION.

5

the individual soul. Sappho's lines to an illiterate and uncultivated friend might have been spoken by the men of the Renaissance to those outside the pale of culture :—
"So, thou shalt die
And lie
Dumb in the silent tomb :
Nor of thy name
Shall there be any fame
In ages yet to be or years to come :
For of the rose
That on Pieria blows
Thou hast no share ;
But in sad Hades' house,
Unknown, inglorious,
'Mid the dim shades that wander there,
Shalt thou flit forth, and haunt the filmy air."

Of the highest and most spiritual aspect of the Renaissance
Petrarch is the grandest representative. Dante stood, as it were,
midway between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance : he had
the strong individuality, the command over form which belonged
to the men of the time of revival, but he had also the deep
religious sense, the mystic yearnings of the Middle Ages. " In
Petrarch scholarship and culture appeared as the divine teachers,
the evangelists of mankind :" they taught that the aim of life was
self-expression—self-expression in its most complete, beautiful,
and harmonious form. With Petrarch love of form was indeed a
passion : before he could understand Latin he was accustomed to
repeat to himself the orations of Cicero, delighting in their majestic
march and rounded periods, though the sense was hidden to him.
But yet at the same time the man who wishes to express his
thoughts in most beautiful form, must, according to Petrarch,
live the best sort of life : he must live so that it comes naturally
to-him to express the highest thoughts and the highest emotions.
" Upon the purity of his enthusiasm, the sincerity of his inspiration, depended the future well-being of the world for which he
laboured. Thus for one man at least the art of letters was a
priesthood, and the earnestness of his vocation made him fit to
be a master of succeeding ages." But succeeding ages in Italy
could not show another man who, like Petrarch, spiritualised the
cult of letters, making them a power over life, taking the place
of religion. Petrarch had indeed none of those mystic religious
yearnings towards the Infinite which distinguished the Middle
Ages; but he was ideally and spiritually minded, and he rendered
spiritual and ideal, the studies that the mediaeval mind considered
hopelessly mundane and finite.

6

INTRODUCTION.

[CHAP. I.

In Boccaccio we have a great man of the Renaissance, but a
representative of its later and less pure spirit. "Petrarch, in
his search after culture, laid stress not only on form and external
beauty, but on spiritual truth and grandeur as the foundation.
Boccaccio left out the latter element. An admirer of beauty
and grace alone, and for themselves, he paved the way for the
sensuality of later times." Of these two men, the first represented the prime, the second the decline, of this first great period,
this age of enthusiasm, of desire for, and belief in culture.
The second great period of the Renaissance is that of the
acquisition and systematisation of knowledge, of the discovery
of manuscripts, of the foundation of libraries. Nicholas Y.
founds the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de Medici begins the
Medicean collection: it is the age of men who, like Poggio
Braccolini, ransack all the cities and convents in Europe for manuscripts ; of those men, the real heroes of the period, the teachers
of Greek, who in the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople, and began the worship of manuscripts, of the text of
Homer, of Plato, of Aristotle. Printing presses were established
at Florence, Venice, Bale, Lyons, and Paris. Virgil was printed
in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. Then
comes the third age, marked both in England and Europe by the
name of Erasmus. Then began that critical assimilation of the
material collected, the first-fruits of which are seen in the
Florentine Academy; but then also culminated in Italy that
degeneration which was hinted at in the work of Boccaccio. The
spirituality so strong in the personality and writings of Petrarch
became absent in the thought and individuality of the majority
of men who represent this phase of the Renaissance: belief in
man becomes arrogance, the desire to develop and exercise the
faculties becomes self - indulgence: the worship of form, the
appreciation of external beauty, overpowers everything else : " a n
affectionate study," says Bacon, " of eloquence and copie of speech
began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men
began to hunt more after words than matter: more after the
choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of
the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying
and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after
the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument,
life of invention, depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing
and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price.
Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon
Cicero the orator, and Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his

CHAP. I.]

INTRODUCTION.

7

own book of Periods and Imitation and the like. Then did Car
of Cambridge and Ascham with their lectures and writings almost
deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that
were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning.
Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo, Decern
annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone; and the echo answered in
Greek, One (Asine). . . . In sum, the whole inclination of those
times was rather towards copie than weight." And Erasmus,
fearing its worldly tendency, goes so far as to mistrust the introduction of scholarship into the north. " One scruple still besets
my mind, lest under the cloak of revived literature, Paganism
should strive to raise its head, there being among Christian men,
who, while they recognise the name of Christ, breathe in their
hearts the spirit of the Gentiles."
Italy in this later and degenerate phase, as well as in its
earlier, influenced England. In its purer and earlier stage it
was the prophet of antique culture, and of a new and vigorous
ideal which gave glory and interest to life: in its later stage,
when its culture, its admiration for external form, was modified
by no spiritual element, by no ideal of truth, by no sense of the
dignity and responsibility of man,—when the spirit of Christianity
had vanished and left a philosophy pagan and Machiavellian in its
tendencies,—it became feared and abhorred by English thinkers.
Socially it was considered the ruin of Englishmen,—"an Italianated
Englishman is the devil incarnate :" politically it was discredited
in English eyes, as being represented by Machiavelli, who, if not
the monster of ingenious crime, the impersonation of subtle
villainy as conceived by Elizabethan dramatists, yet carried
frankly to an immoral extreme in politics the pagan ethics of
self-interest.
England came into direct contact with Italy as early as the
middle of the fourteenth century. Three of Chaucer's diplomatic
missions, in 1372, 1374, and 1378, took him to Italy, and we know
how much stimulus and material he received from his admiration and knowledge of the works of the first great Italians of the
Kenaissance. Men like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester made
libraries and brought over Italian scholars into England to
translate Greek works; Henry VI. and Edward IV. were both of
them cultivated men, and interested in literature. In England
there were a few scholars like John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester,
who had won fame in the schools of Italy. Both in Chaucer
and in Wyclif, we can see the stirrings of that twofold movement,
the first faint anticipation of the great movement of the sixteenth

8

INTRODUCTION.

[CHAP. I.

century. But the absorbing interest of a troubled national life,
the absence of leisure, prevented that activity of speculative and
imaginative thought, of which the result is literature. The Wars
of the Roses, the quiet of exhaustion in the reign of Henry VII.,
when the new monarchy was gathering up its strength to begin
its career of despotism, delayed the literary movement, till it
came coincident with the Reformation. The final throwing off
of Papal authority did not indeed happen till 1534, but long
before that, signs of the movement marked by the statutes of
Praemunire and Pro visors, spiritually quickened by the teaching
of Wyclif, and especially by the teaching of the Sfew Learning,
had shown itself. Henry VIII., actuated only by caprice and
personal motives, accomplished what had really been for some
time desired by the instinct of the nation; political circumstances
alone had delayed the event, and thus it happened that a legal
movement which upset old-established religious institutions, which
quickened religious energy and demanded religious speculation,
came exactly at the same time as a movement in the direction
of wider culture, wider intellectual freedom,—a movement led by
Italy, with its now fully-developed ideals of humanism. And to
this coincidence may be partly due the moral and religious
character of the Renaissance in England,—a character which
distinguishes it specially from that of Italy, where humanism
eventually became paganism in its most degenerate and self-indulgent form. In England religious enthusiasm mingled with literary
enthusiasm : man was not left after the destruction of the religion
and the ideals of the Middle Ages to satisfy his spiritual cravings
with culture alone. In some of the men who represent this period
in England,—in Spenser, in Sidney, in More, and in Ascham,—
religious and literary enthusiasm meet and blend. Shakespeare
has the deep moral sense which gives dignity and proportion to
his view of life, enabling him to shape it to artistic purposes :
one of the greatest of the Elizabethans was Hooker, with his
fervent religious enthusiasm; and even to the end of the period,
even in its decline, we have a touch of spirituality; in the obscure
conceits of the so-called metaphysical school, in the religious
poems of Herbert and Crashaw, in the nobility of feeling of some
of the cavalier poets, and in the respect shown for morality by
the dramatists of the degenerate Elizabethan stage, by Beaumont
and Fletcher, even by Webster and Ford.
But the coincidence of these two movements must not count
alone as the cause: for deep down in the Teutonic nature lies
that want of contentment with the actual life, that craving for

CHAP. I.]

INTRODUCTION.

9

a serious solution of the problems of life and death, which a
spiritual belief can alone satisfy. " Their climate is damp," says
M. Taine, "hence arises a grand melancholy, and then the
religious idea of duty." But climate cannot altogether explain
the religious tendencies of the English Renaissance,—the causes
which prevented the English from reacting so strongly against
the influences of the Middle Ages, as to seek, like the Italians,
to find in knowledge and culture alone, food for the soul and
guidance for human conduct: for the origin and history of the
whole race must be studied in all its details, if the complete nature
of this movement, as of that of any movement in the life of a
nation, is to be thoroughly understood.
It is enough for the purposes of literature to study, as typical
of this great movement in its two aspects, the School of the New
Learning. It is truly representative of the Renaissance in its
broader sense, because it combined a deep religious enthusiasm,—
not yet, however, at variance with established doctrine, but fighting only against degenerate custom,—with a profound belief in
and reverence for the classics. It was its protest against abuses,
its criticism of custom, social, political, educational, and religious,
that destroyed the crushing weight of mediaeval authority : in its
earnestness and interest in these matters, it showed that it held
things of this world to be of importance. In relieving human
life from the weight of ascetic theory and practice, in supplying,
through the classics, new intellectual food, it allowed the national
mind to work freely: it prepared the way for that originality,
for that burst of art of Elizabethan times, which was the expression of its great and healthy vitality.

CHAPTER II.
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND—BEGINNINGS OF THOUGHT—
SCHOOL OP THE NEW LEARNING.

PART I.—Its Worh in Religion.
COLET, John, b. 1466, educated at Magdalene College, Oxford ; studied
afterwards in Paris and Italy ; 1504 made Doctor of Divinity ; 1505
Dean of St. Paul's ; 1510 founded St. Paul's School; d. 1519.
ERASMUS, Desiderius, h. 1467 at Rotterdam, d. 1536.

THE School of the New Learning is as different from the humanistic
school of Italy, as it is different from the school of reformers, who
began the religious revolution known as the Reformation. It
differed from the Italian school in being deeply, profoundly religious : to Colet and Grocyn Greek was valuable because it was
the key by which to unlock the mysteries of the New Testament;
it had little in common with the Calvinistic school, because it
passed with lightness and vagueness over those questions of
original sin and freewill—the chief problems which engrossed
the attention of this school, and which it dogmatically claimed
to solve. The school of the New Learning was too literary, too
largely human to seek refuge in one dogma in order to refute
another; its work was perhaps more destructive than constructive in its tendency; it did more in destroying prejudices, in
attacking abuses, in clearing the way for the next step in progress,
than in framing the creeds which were to supersede the old ones.
Its great men were influential, not because, like Luther, they were
the formulators of new beliefs, new dogmas, but because they
were large and liberal minded, because their teachings and their
writings bore the impress of admirable and powerful individuality.
Their teaching was calculated to rouse energy and inspire
thought, though it might be wanting in the definiteness and
dogmatism which distinguished the teaching of the Reformers,
and made it intelligible and helpful to that larger mass of man-

CHAP, ii.]

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

11

kind who need the authority of dogma for their guidance in
life.
It was not its mission to carry through the Reformation. It
was too literary in its tendencies, too tolerant, too inclined to
comprehension, too undogmatic. The Calvinists and the followers of Luther, who could meet dogma by dogma, and thus
give an intelligible rallying-ground to the mass, were the people
who finally broke the fetters of the Church. At first, however,
the divergence of the English school of the New Learning from
the Reformers in Europe was not perceptible. The notion of
the Oxford Reformers was that the Church should be broad—
tolerant—that it should not too strictly define doctrine and
enforce dogma; " i t was to afford a practical bond of union
whereby Christians might be united in a Christian brotherhood
in spite of differences of minor matters of creed." The New
Learning " in the mouth of Erasmus hinted that the doctrine of
original sin was of no more importance than the problems of
astrology, and treated questions of freewill as insoluble. . . . But
the Augustinian system of which Luther was the exponent
treated these questions as practically decided, and that by the
judgment of a Church based upon a verbally inspired and infallible
Bible. Luther's attitude was therefore dogmatic and occasionally
inconsistent. He asserted the right of private judgment as a
weapon against the Pope and Papal theory; but he was not
willing that Scripture should be left to the private judgment of
the individual; he recognised, as opposed to the corrupt ecclesiastical authority of the Romish Church, the existence of an
ecclesiastical authority of some kind, which had established these
theological hypotheses of original sin and justification by faith."
Thus the Reformation in England was a movement distinct from
that of the Oxford Reformers, not altogether a continuation of
their work. They had agreed with Luther when, in 1517, he
put up his thesis against indulgences on the church door of
Wittenberg. Erasmus himself had spoken of the crimes of false
pardons, Colet of the "sins of that first bishop we call the Pope."
But they did not go with Luther when, in 1519, at the Diet of
Worms, he 'practically appealed to Germany to throw off the
whole of the Papal yoke in doctrine as well as in corrupt practice.
The New Learning wished for no change in doctrine and pure
ecclesiastical observance : it wished merely for the reform of the
Church, and for the purer spirit that must come with it.
The movement of the New Learning may be said to have begun
in 1496. In the Michaelmas term of this year at Oxford, John

12

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

Colet, a late student at the University, recently returned from
Italy, announced his intention of delivering a course of public
lectures on St. Paul's Epistles. He had left the university in
1494, and had then commenced his studies at Florence, and
while there had come into contact with three of the greatest men
of the period, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Savonarola. Marsilio Ficino, at the head of the Florentine Academy,
had made it the object of his life to fuse religion and philosophy;
in his study burnt two lamps, one before the image of the Virgin,
the other before the bust of Plato. In his book, Be Religione
Christians, dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, he grounds religion
on expediency, and supports it by the authority of the classics.
All religions, he says, being natural to man, contain in them
some good—in particular the Christian religion; and the fact that
Christianity passes the human comprehension is a sign of its
divine character; "if these things be divine they must exceed
the capacity of any human mind." To the support of his faith
he brings the testimony of the great names of the past: faith,
according to Aristotle, is the foundation of knowledge : by faith
alone, as the Platonists prove, do we ascend to God. But a
stronger and more inspiring influence than that of Ficino and
Pico, with their endeavours to fuse Neo-Platonism and Christianity,
was that of Savonarola, an influence purely spiritual and Christian.
Colet was in Italy when the Papacy spiritually was at its lowest
ebb. Alexander VI. and Cesar Borgia had brought it to the
greatest degradation, and Savonarola, with his burning enthusiasm
for the reform of the Church, with his great and irresistible
personality, was heading a purer religious movement. For two
years and more he " had been preaching that a scourge was at
hand, that the world was certainly not framed for the lasting
convenience of hypocrites, libertines, and oppressors. From the
midst of those smiling heavens he had seen a sword hanging—
the sword of God's justice—which was speedily to descend with
purifying punishment on the Church and the world. In brilliant
Ferrara, seventeen years before, the contradiction between men's
lives and their professed beliefs had pressed upon him with a
force that had been enough to destroy his appetite for the world,
and at the age of twenty-three had driven him into the cloister.
He believed that God had committed to the Church the sacred
lamp of truth for the guidance and salvation of men, and he saw
that the Church in its corruption had become as a sepulchre to
hide the lamp. As the years went on scandals increased and
multiplied, and hypocrisy seemed to have given place to impu-

CHAP, IL]

ITS WORK IN RELIGION.

13

dence. Had the world then ceased to have a righteous ruler 1
Was the Church finally forsaken ? No, assuredly; in the
Sacred Book there was a record of the past, in which might be
seen as in a glance what would be in the days to come, and the
book showed that when the wickedness of the chosen people,
type of the Christian Church, had become crying, the judgments
of God had descended on them. . . . But the real force of
demonstration for Girolamo Savonarola lay in his own burning
indignation at the sight of wrong, in his fervent belief in an
unseen justice which would put an end to the wrong, and in an
unseen Purity to which lying and uncleanness were an abomination. To his ardent power-loving soul, believing in great ends,
and longing to achieve those ends by the exertion of its own
strong will, the faith in a supreme and righteous ruler became
one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition that would
punish and reclaim." And this man had a power, rarely equalled,
of impressing his belief on others, of swaying very various minds.
Lorenzo de Medici tried in vain to gain his friendship; in vain
on his deathbed he asked for absolution. Savonarola refused to
grant his friendship and his spiritual offices to one who was the
enemy of reform, the supporter of corruption in Church and
State. Pico della Mirandola, though he clung to his NeoPlatonism, became at his death a half-acknowledged disciple of
the Frate; he was buried in the robes of Savonarola's order and
within the precincts of Savonarola's church. Marsilio Ficino,
more purely pagan in his tendencies, was certainly influenced,
though not for long, by his powerful enthusiasm. Colet must
have heard him preach in the Duomo at Florence. He must
have heard at least one of those powerful appeals to the religious
world, the first of which was given in 1491—the call to rally
against tyranny in Church and State, to fight against idolatry of
philosophy and neglect of the Bible. Colet, an Englishman with
a profound moral sense, could not but be influenced by a teaching
appealing so strongly to his moral sympathies. Here was a man
who had a faith, not merely speculative and philosophic, but a
faith which stimulated and supported a burning enthusiasm for
right, and a glowing indignation against wrong. And thus
Colet gave himself up to the study of the sources from whence
Savonarola claimed to draw his inspiration—to the study of the
Holy Scriptures, and of the works of the Fathers of that purer
Church to which Savonarola pointed as the model of its degenerate
child. He studied classics indeed, but only as a means to improve
his style, only to enable him to make his teaching of the Gospel

14

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

more acceptable to the English people,—a work which he was now
to consider as his mission. His attitude is that of Erasmus in
his preface to the Novum Instrumentum: " I n times like these,
when men are pursuing with such zest all branches of knowledge,
how is it that the philosophy of Christ should alone be derided
by some, neglected by many, treated by the few who devote
themselves to it with coldness, not to say insincerity ? Whilst
in all other branches of learning the human mind is straining
its genius to master all subtleties, and toiling to overcome all
difficulties, why is it that this one philosophy alone is not
pursued with equal earnestness at least by those who profess to
be Christians'? Platonists, Pythagoreans, and the disciples of
all other philosophers, are well instructed and ready to fight for
their sect. Why do not Christians with yet more abundant zeal
espouse the cause of their Master and Prince 1 Shall Christ be
put in comparison with Zeno and Aristotle,—his doctrine with
their insignificant precepts ^ Whatever other philosophers may
have been, He alone is a teacher from heaven; He alone was able
to teach certain and eternal wisdom; He alone taught things
pertaining to salvation, because He alone is its author; He alone
absolutely practised what He preached, and is able to make good
what He promised. The philosophy of Christ, moreover, is to
be learned from its few books with far less labour than the
Aristotelian philosophy is to be extracted from its multitude of
ponderous and conflicting commentaries. Nor is anxious preparatory learning needful to the Christian. Its viaticum is
simple and at hand to all,—only bring a pious and open heart,
imbued above all things with a pure and simple faith." With
these views, with the enthusiasm given by a " pure and simple
faith," Colet came back to England; his strength lay in no
dogma, but " in the conviction that the food for all spiritual
craving was to be found in the Bible; that its inspired words
were to be interpreted simply and directly without the intervention of ecclesiastic and scholastic dogma." Again, the words
of Erasmus can be used as expressing his opinion: " The mysteries
of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even
the weakest woman should read the gospel-—should read the
Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all
languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only
by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To
make them understood is surely the first step." To hold these
views, and to act on them, was to strike at the very root of

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK m RELIGION.

15

mediaeval religion and mediaeval scholasticism. "Keep firmly
to the Bible and to the Apostle's Creed, and let divines, if they
like, dispute about the rest," said Colet, and thus expressed in
these few words his freedom from the oppressive yoke of ecclesiastic and scholastic authority, and his contempt of the great structure of mediaeval divinity, with its six or seven hundred propositions, considered so vital by the mediaeval mind, forty-three
propositions concerning the nature of God, forty-five propositions
concerning the nature of man. He did not consider human ingenuity worthily employed on such questions, as to whether God can
be in more than one place at one and the same time, as how many
angels can stand on the point of a needle, whether they have
local motion or not. All these problems of scholastic divinity
laid down by Aquinas in Summce, Tkeologice, Colet with that
independence of mind which could belong only to a man of the
Benaissance put aside with scorn. He refused to recognise the
two Molochs before which his predecessors had bowed, the dogma
of the Church and the dogma of Aristotle's logic, the latter
debased by these so-called disciples, employing itself on the
material allowed by the Church, till the human mind seemed
to lose itself in a series of intellectual gymnastics, acquiring a
profound indifference to facts, and an extraordinary subtlety in
dealing with barren and useless problems.
Secondly, Colet had to attack that theory, necessarily upheld
by the Schoolmen, but a fatal obstacle to those who wished
for the simple and direct interpretation of the Bible, viz. that
belief held by every orthodox divine, "in the plenary and verbal
inspiration of the Bible, considered as an arsenal of texts, each
text capable of several meanings, and capable of being severed
from their context and interpreted to suit the convenience of
ecclesiastic dogma." "Inasmuch," says Aquinas, " a s God is
the author of the Holy Scriptures, and all things were at one
time present to His mind, therefore under a single text several
meanings can be expressed; the literal sense is manifold; the
spiritual sense threefold : allegorical, moral, anagogical." Thus
a single text may mean several different things, and an instance
of their hopeless want of simplicity was their belief that the
literal sense profited nothing; " i t is hurtful, noisome, and killeth
the soul;" and St. Paul was^quoted : " The letter killeth, but the
spirit giveth life." In the words of a scholar contemporary with
Colet, " They were wont to look on no more Scripture than they
found in their Duns . . . some of them will prove a point of
faith as well out of a fable of Ovid or out of any other poet as out

16

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

of St. John's Gospel or St. Paul's Epistles." Thus the Bible had
become a dead book, and Golet, feeling that the purity of the
Christian faith demanded its separation from scholasticism,
made it his first object in his lectures on St. Paul's Epistles to
strike a direct blow at the method of scholastic interpretation of
the Scriptures. He displayed in them no analytical skill; he did
not propound problems, and, after the manner of the Schoolmen,
instead of finding solutions, find distinctions; he felt with Bacon
that the strength of any train of thought depends on viewing all
the facts together, in treating all as parts of a whole; that
weakness comes when the parts are considered separately. Thus
he treated St. Paul's Epistles as a whole, endeavouring to bring
out their central meaning and their direct bearing on practical
life; and by tracing as far as possible the workings of the mind
that prompted the words and thoughts, to communicate as much
as possible of his spirit, and so to give that sympathy which
makes understanding simpler. In dealing with the Epistle to
the Bomans he naturally touched on the question of freewill,
the great question with the Wittenberg Reformers; but he
touched on it with a vagueness which came from his anti-philosophic tendencies; his great spiritual enthusiasm, which made
minor moral problems dim to him, caused him to pass over it
lightly, offering only a mystic solution, which could be satisfactory to none save those who shared his spiritual temperament.
"The soul is won over to God by love, and as so, willingly, and
yet by no merit of its own." This was the same theory by which
Savonarola, according to Yillari, explained to a certain extent
the mystery of human liberty and divine omnipotence. Golet
says: " Grace is nothing but the love of God towards men, towards
those, i.e. whom He wills to love, and in loving to inspire
with the Holy Spirit which itself is love and the love of God . . .
and when we speak of men as being called, justified, and glorified
by grace, we mean nothing else than that men love in return
God who loves them."
The men of the new learning were essentially practical men,
not busied over the speculative solution of moral problems,—
scholars indeed, but anxious above all to communicate the truths
and the light which they esteemed themselves to have gained by
study; and to Colet the great question of ecclesiastical reform,
which was naturally raised by the influence he had come under,
and by his mode of thought, became a vital burning subject,
engrossing the principal share of his attention, dwarfing in its
importance the dogmatic questions of original sin and freewill.

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IN RELIGION.

17

The personality of St. Paul himself was a rebuke to ecclesiastics
of the day : " The priests of our time might well be admonished
to set such an example as this amongst their own parishioners,
as, for example, St. Paul, who chose to get his living with his
hands at the trade of tent-making, so as to avoid over-suspicion
of avarice or scandal to the Gospel." I t would be well if " those
lost fools," as he at one time called the clergy, would bestir
themselves and cultivate that energy which comes only from
temperate and unselfish living. It was from the study of the
pseudo-Dionysian writers that he received the most powerful
stimulus to his efforts for Church reform. These writings were
supposed to be the productions of Dionysius, the Areopagite, the
disciple of St. Paul, and as such were read and studied by
Colet; and he was much grieved when Grocyn—superior to him
as a Greek scholar—in 1498, gave it as his firm opinion, grounded
on study and examination of them, that they must belong to a
much later date. The Florentine school had studied them much,
because of the mixture they contained of ISTeo-Platonism and
Christianity; but while the Florentine drew most from the
philosophic element, Colet made most of the Christian element
which was derived from the purer Christianity of the early
Church, and in its purity of observance and simplicity of doctrine gave a severe rebuke to the ecclesiastical scandals of the
day, while it claimed to show the sacred and apostolic origin of
the monarchical system and its sacraments. It assumed that
any priesthood laying claim to apostolic origin must above all
things lay stress on the pure and personal holiness of its members. Sacraments were nothing apart from the purity and
reality of the spiritual meaning they bore to those who received
and those who administered them. " I t is because these most
holy traditions have been superseded and neglected, and men
have fallen away from the spirit of God to their own inventions,
that beyond all doubt all things have been wretchedly disturbed
and confounded, and, as I said before, unless God shall have
mercy upon us, all things will go to ruin." Stimulated by " these
holy traditions," he put his greatest energy into efforts, then so
full of risk, towards religious reform. In 1504 he was made
doctor and Dean of St. Paul's, and in 1512 he was appointed to
preach the sermon before the members of Convocation assembled
nominally for the extirpation of heresy really because the King
wanted money for his expedition to France. He had to preach
to bishops who had received their benefices as the reward
of purely secular services, or because they had interest in high
c

18

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. I I .

places, little or sometimes no regard being paid to their culture
or merit. There was one bishop of whom Erasmus speaks, a
youth so illiterate that he offered to Erasmus a benefice and a
large sum of money if he would undertake his tuition for a year—
a bribe which Erasmus refused; there were foreign bishops who
only resided for a short time in their dioceses : the Bishop of
Bath and Wells was a foreigner, and lived almost entirely abroad;
the Bishop of Winchester was appointed by the Pope, and lived
and died at Borne. Lastly, there was that churchman of gigantic
ability and secular aims, who was as conspicuous among the
political school of ecclesiastics as Julius II. was among those
popes of the secularised Church of the fifteenth century, viz. Wolsey,
who, high in royal favour, always engaged in affairs of state,
lately promoted to the deanery of Lincoln, waiting for a vacant
bishopric, and already possessing two rectories, a prebend, and
a canonry, rose eventually from a bishop to be an archbishop,
a legate, and a cardinal, and failed only to obtain the Papal
crown. It was to such an audience that Colet spoke with great
frankness, laying bare the fact that " t h e Church had become
foul and deformed," describing its condition, exhorting them to
reform it, and showing what the necessary measures must be.
" If by chance," he says in conclusion, " I should seem to have
gone too far in this sermon,—if I have said anything with too
much warmth,—forgive it me, and pardon a man speaking out of
zeal, a man sorrowing for the ruin of the Church; and passing
by any foolishness of mine, consider the thing itself." This
humility was not copied from Savonarola : the Italian burnt too
much with the sense of wrong to think or even to care what others
thought. But probably Colet's success was due to the tact he
showed in his personal dealings with the authorities, whose conduct he so desired to reform. The young King Henry VIII. was
on the whole favourably inclined to the New Learning, holding in
great respect its secular work, its study and teaching of the
classics. And well it was that he felt kindly towards it, that he
encouraged it, hoping " i t would reform the corrupt morals of
the age," for Colet was carried by his enthusiasm so far as to
preach against the Continental wars, against the aim and the
means of Henry VIII.'s cherished ambition, " the recovery of his
lost inheritance and patrimony, France." The interview in which
the King's resentment was soothed after it had been provoked by
the attack on his policy, does perhaps more credit to the King's
magnanimity than to Colet's behaviour, which savours rather of
weakness in its vague statements and recriminations.

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IE" RELIGION.

19

Well it was for Colet that his religious efforts were entirely
agreeable to royal authority—that he did not clash with the
Tudor views in doctrine. Colet's main aim was the reform of
ecclesiastical custom : his independent mind had not yet carried
him into what his contemporaries called heresy. Yet among
those who attended his lectures—so earnest in their thought and
so simple in their style as to merit Erasmus's commendation,
"Your words having birth in your heart and not on your lips,
expressing with ease what others can hardly express with the
greatest labour "—were many Lollards, attracted no doubt by his
absence of formalism, by his attempt to grasp the spiritual
meaning of religion. But Colet was no more a Lollard than he
was an orthodox follower of the Catholic Church. Neither was
he, strictly speaking, a humanist, for there was in his fervent
appeal to his hearers to follow the example of Christ, a tinge of
the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The secret, he says, of
Christ's wonderful example, lay in His keeping Himself as retired
as possible from the world, from the lust of the flesh and lust of
the eye. " His body He held altogether in obedience and service
to His blessed mind, eating after long fasts, sleeping after long
watching, caring nothing for what belongs to wealth or fortune."
Yet monasticism and its superstitions had no hold on him. He
had none of the Catholic reverence for the great monk, Thomas
a Becket. His disgust was great when, in 1514, visiting the
shrine of the martyr, he was presented with the saint's shoe to
kiss.
Colet is one of the most representative men of the Renaissance of Thought in England, belonging to no one Church, to no
definite sect or party, widely cultivated and widely tolerant,
guided by no authority, but striving always to be true to his
own inner light.
Much more decided and definite in his views—much more
brilliant—was his contemporary and friend, Erasmus, a man
who, though not English, plays an important part in England as
a prominent disciple of the New Learning,—specially important,
perhaps, as suggesting to More his method of social and political
criticism. Erasmus had been educated at Paris among the
straitest sect of scholastic logicians; he was well versed in the
scholastic subtleties of Duns Scotus, and so celebrated for the
almost serpent-like ingenuity of his arguments, that More,—at the
conclusion of an argument in which Erasmus, at their first meeting, had, in Scotist fashion, defended the "worser part,"—replying
to his query " aut tu es Morus, aut nullus," answered " aut tu es

20

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

ECHAP. II.

Erasmus, aut diabolus." Erasmus had at his fingers' ends the
knowledge of that great body of mediaeval science which claimed
to embrace the whole field of universal knowledge,—its scholars
thinking, as Galileo says, that they could arrive at scientific
truth, not by the investigation of fact, but by the comparison of
ancient manuscripts. These so-called scientific truths were used
by the Schoolmen to support their theological system, and it was
because men like Bruno and Galileo discovered facts which upset
not only their science but their theology, that they were the
victims of persecution. Disgusted with this science and this
theology, Erasmus came in 1498 to Oxford with Lord Mountjoy
in order to learn Greek of Grocyn and Linacre. His intention
had been to go on afterwards to Italy, but after a few months'
experience of Oxford life he writes " that he had found in England
so much polish and learning, not showy, shallow learning, but
profound and exact both in Latin and Greek, that now he would
hardly care much about going to Italy at all. . . . When I listen
to my friend Colet," he says, " it seems to me like listening to Plato
himself." In the winter of 1499-1500 Erasmus varied his experiences by a life at Court. In 1500 he returned to Paris, where,
in spite of a life spent in struggle with poverty and sickness, he
wrote his Adagia. It is in this work, a translation and collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, that he appears specially as a
representative of the third age of the Italian Renaissance, of that
spirit of criticism and philosophy which followed in Italy on
the desire of acquisition; a spirit which Erasmus, as well as the
English disciples of the New Learning, combined with the earlier
characteristics of the Renaissance—with the strong and enthusiastic reverence for classic culture.
In his religious works—in the Enchiridion, in his Novum
Instrumentum—Erasmus shows himself a disciple of Colet: in his
Praise of Folly he shows himself a precursor of More. The
Praise of Folly, written 1509-1510 to beguile his journey from
England to Italy, is the first of a series of works containing, in
a more or less disguised form, social and political criticism.
Folly is represented as entering the rostrum with cap and bells,
expressing with a frank severity her views on the condition of
society and of politics. In the ingenious way in which the bold
speakers of the time avoided the responsibility of their words,
Folly apologises for her speeches as being merely those of Foolishness incarnated, yet at the same time adds, " but a fool speaks
oft a reasonable truth." The book is a satire upon follies of
all kinds, "on the bookworm, the sportsman, the grammarian,

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IN RELIGION.

21

the superstitious, the schools and schoolmen, on scholastic science,
theology and its divines." Erasmus's exceeding severity to the
latter shows that he had suffered much from them. " Their
pride and irritability are such that they will come down upon
me with their 600 conclusions and compel me to recant or
declare me a heretic forthwith. They explain to their own
satisfaction the most hidden mysteries; how the universe was
constructed and arranged; through what channels the stain of
original sin descends to posterity; how the miraculous birth of
Christ was effected; how in the Eucharistic wafer the accidents
can exist without a substance, and so forth ; and they think themselves equal to the solutions of questions such as these : Whether
God could have taken upon Himself the nature of a woman, a
devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone, and how in that case a gourd
could have preached, worked miracles, and be nailed to the cross;
what Peter would have consecrated if he had consecrated the
Eucharist at the moment when the body of Christ was hanging
on the Cross." If Erasmus could boldly hold up to ridicule things
which his education had taught him were the most sacred of all
mysteries,—the reverence for which he had hardly shaken off
when he came to England, being shocked and astonished at
Colet's anger against Thomas Aquinas and his servile followers,—
his satire on ecclesiastical, social, and political affairs could not
surely be wanting in candour and impartiality. The monks he
places in a body among the goats on the left hand of God; his
satire ascends even to the personality generally considered the
most sacred and above criticism. The Pope Julius II. is alluded
to as a decrepit old man, delighting in war. His remarks on the
duty of kings must have been a commentary far from pleasant
on the action of Henry VIII. He says " it is the duty of kings to
seek their public and not their private good; but princes cast
such care to the world, and only care for their own pleasure."
When the memory of Empson and Dudley and of Henry VII.
was fresh, words like the following were full of meaning : " They
think they fill the position well if they hunt with diligence, if
they keep good houses, if they can make gain to themselves by
the sale of offices and places, if they can daily devise some new
means of undermining the wealth of citizens and raking it into
their own exchequer, disguising the iniquity of such proceedings
by some specious pretence and show of legality." His views on
the Pope are no less to the point, and enunciated with no less
boldness.
Julius II., then on the Papal throne, marks an important

22

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. IT.

epoch in the history of the papacy—an epoch for which the great
Hildebrand had in earlier times paved the way. Hildebrand
had endeavoured to revive the spiritual supremacy of the papacy;
he had tried to realise his ambitious conception of the Papal
prerogative; he attempted to make the Pope in very truth the
spiritual head of Christendom, the ruling power in that universal
and mystic monarchy of which the Roman Emperor was supposed
to be the temporal head. But in attempting to spiritualise the
world he secularised the papacy. The line between the spiritual
and temporal powers was vaguely defined, and Hildebrand
brought these two powers into collision by the attempt to extend
the spiritual dominion of the Church. Then began that duel of
the Emperor and the Pope which destroyed for ever the theory
and practice of a universal Roman empire, and gradually degraded
the spiritual prestige of the papacy in Europe. The Pope had
to seek for allies in the struggle with the Emperor : he divided
Europe against itself, and sunk more and more to the position
of a temporal monarch. Discredited by his immediate predecessors, it was ruined by Julius II. when he bent his energies
to making the papacy a temporal Christian principality,—when,
as Yon Ranke says, "he devoted himself to the gratification of
that innate love of war and conquest which was indeed the
ruling passion of his life.'" Where was now the priesthood that
could say, L o ! we have left all and followed thee % " And
although," says Erasmus, "war be a thing so savage that it
becomes wild beasts rather than men,—so frantic that the poets
feigned it to be the work of the furies, so pestilent that it blights
at once all morality, so unjust that it can be best waged by the
worst of ruffians, so impious that it has nothing in common with
Christ,—yet to the neglect of everything else he devotes himself
to war alone." War was not only the condition of the papacy,
it was also that of Europe. For Europe was in a state of transition, no longer recognising the Pope as spiritual head, or even
as arbiter in international quarrels, and yet not so fully recognising its own existence as a system of contiguous states as
to formulate rules of international intercourse. War was the
only method of settling the claims of these growing states, each
intent on self-aggrandisement, and thinking the prosperity of
one nation must be grounded on the ruin of another. The
Emperor was intriguing by marriage to gain Hungary and
Bohemia, to annex the Netherlands, Franche Comte and Artois,
Castile and Aragon; and what aggrandisement he could not
effect by marriage he tried to effect by arms, and to make what

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IN RELIGION".

23

he gained independent of Papal interference and hereditary in
the house of Hapsburg. Louis of France was laying claim to a
great part of Italy. Henry VIII., besides aiming at the conquest
of France, was ready to be a candidate for the empire, and was
plotting to secure the papacy for Wolsey. The neglect of national
interests for what appeared to be but the selfish personal aims of
kings, the absence of all international morality, the shameless
breaches of faith continually occurring between the crowned
heads, could not fail to rouse Erasmus. The political allusions
in the Praise of Folly were but the prelude to his more serious
political work, The Christian Prince.
In The Christian Prince, published 1516, Erasmus develops
his theory of the duties of a prince in marked contrast to the
practice he observed: "If you find you cannot defend your
kingdom without violating justice, without shedding much human
blood, without much injury to religion, lay it down and retire from
it . . . a good prince never enters upon war at all unless after
trying all possible means to avoid it." These views suggest by
way of contrast those of Machiavelli in The Prince, written in
1513, with the same object, but in a far different spirit.- " A
prince," says Machiavelli, " should have but one object, one
thought, one art—the art of w a r ; " and the comparison brings
out the intense dissimilarity between the course of the Renaissances in England and in Italy. In Italy the effort after the
union of faith and reason had been given up. The Christian
enthusiasm roused by Savonarola had passed away; thwarted,
scorned, and disgraced, stripped of his friar's frock by the Bishop
of Vasona, he had died amid the apparent ruin of all he had
striven for, saying only " Christ did more for me." The spiritual
and philosophic enthusiasm of Ficino and Pico had vanished.
It was the fashion to scoff at Christianity, to believe only in the
philosophy of Pliny and Aristotle. Machiavelli in The Prince
had codified the maxims of the dominant anti-Christian school
of politics; he boldly formulated the theory which all Europe
was tacitly carrying into practice. He had the great quality of
frankness, or, in other words, he had that shamelessness which
denies to virtue even the faint compliment of belief. Hegel says
it was necessity which drove him to i t ; it was his sense of the
necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down
the principles on which alone he thought a state could be formed
under the circumstances . . . " and though our idea of freedom
is incompatible with the means which he proposes, both as the
only available and also as wholly justifiable, including as these

24

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. 11.

do the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and
the like, yet we must confess that the despots who had to be
subdued were assailable in no other way, inasmuch as indomitable
lawlessness and perfect depravity were thoroughly engrained in
them." Macaulay believes in the "generous heart of Clement;"
he quotes the rhetoric of the patriotic appeal to Lorenzo de
Medici, for whom the treatise was penned, animated with the
spirit of the prophecy of Petrarch, with which it closes :—
" Lo ! valour against rage
Shall take up arms, nor shall the fight be long,
Eor that old heritage
Of courage in Italian hearts is stout and strong."

But even the sum of Machiavelli's virtues cannot suffice to raise
him out of the rank of depraved human nature. What makes a
man great is not his capacity for understanding human nature as
it is, but his capacity for understanding its possibilities, what it
might be and what it can be, his capacity for connecting conduct with a high idea of duty, however depraved and degenerate
be the world in which he has to live and act. But simplicity
and goodness were to Machiavelli synonymous with ignorance and
foolishness. The souls of those who, like Peter Soderini, could
be guileless in a world of sin, were fit only to go to the limbo of
babes. He is the true representative of Italian thought and
action at this epoch, wanting in beliefs, wanting in ideals, in
the conditions of healthy progress. He stands out in strong contrast to the men of the English school—men wanting, perhaps,
in his subtlety and keenness of his thought, but whose morality
was not determined by the force of existing circumstances, who
were capable of energetic protest and free healthy criticism suggested by reverence for ideals. Of the political and social ideas of
the English school More, stimulated probably by Erasmus, is the
representative, as Colet is of its religious and educational aims.
In his Utopia we have an exposition of the social and political
aims of the New Learning, as in Colet's sermons and treatises
we have the expression of its religious views.

CHAP, ii.] ITS WORK IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM.

P A E T I I . — I t s Work in Social and Political

25

Criticism.

MOKE, Thomas, b. 1478 ; at Canterbury College, Oxford, 1492-93 ; studies
at New Inn, 1494-95 ; enters Lincoln's Inn, 1496 ; meets Erasmus,
1498 ; enters Parliament, 1504 ; made under-sheriff, 1509 ; life at Court
commences, 1518; made Lord Chancellor, 1529; resigns his office, 1532 ;
executed, 1535.—Second part of Utopia written, 1515.—First, 1516.

More stands out not only as a representative of the New
Learning on its political and social side, but as one of the most
sincere and genial souls that have ever embodied their thoughts
in literature. To no one can he better be compared than to
Charles Lamb, possessing a nature charming in its simplicity
and its spontaneity, yet capable at the same time of the most
unflinching purpose and of the greatest heroism; guiding his
conduct by a high idea of duty, yet neither " reproving other
men's lives nor glorying in his own." No gratified sense of
superiority is at the root of his satire: " i t is animated by
that loving laughter in which the only recognised superiority is
the ideal self, the god within, holding the mirror and the
scourge for our pettiness as well as our neighbour's." He was
born in 1478. His father, a successful lawyer, placed him,
according to the custom of the times, in domestic service with
the Archbishop and Cardinal Morton, a man of whom More
speaks with enthusiasm in the first book of Utopia, who was
celebrated as the friend of Edward IV. and the enemy of
Richard I I I . ; influential in raising Henry VII. to the throne,
in promoting his schemes; known to posterity as the author of
that obnoxious tax called " Morton's Fork." Here he imbibed
culture and the ideas of courtly life, and so quick was his wit
and so promising his intellect that the Cardinal entertained the
highest hopes for his future. "This child here, waiting at
table," he said one day, " whoever will live to see it, shall prove
a marvellous man." When he was at Oxford in 1492-93 he first
met Colet, who, though twelve years older, was then studying
Greek under Grocyn and Linacre. Colet's opinion corroborated
that of the Cardinal: More in his eyes was " the one genius of
whom England can boast." He is " the sweetest Thomas," of
whom Erasmus says : " When did nature mould a character
more gentle, more endearing, more happy." His college career
was prematurely cut short. His father, fearing that the study
of the Greek language and philosophy, which had evidently
a great charm for him, would deter him from that rigid and

26

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. I I .

severe course of studies necessary as preparation for the bar,
removed him from Oxford, and from 1494 to 1495 we find
him reading at the New Inn. After his term of legal study
was over and he was called to the bar, he began his lectures
in the Church of St. Lawrence on the " D e Civitate Dei,"
attempting in them to show the connection between the history
of the Romans and their character and religion. He wTas
afterwards appointed reader at Furnival's Inn, and in 1503-4,
when only twenty-five, he became member of Parliament, and
sat in that last and most subservient Parliament of Henry VII.,
of which Dudley was the Speaker.
" In this Parliament
the King demanded two so-called reasonable aids, one for
the marriage of the King's daughter Margaret with the
King of Scots, the other for the knighting of the King's son.
These reasonable aids were made the foundation of a demand
of three-fifteenths, one half as much again as he had previously
required to defray the cost of the recent war." The grant had
passed two readings, when More arose and " made such arguments and reasons there against," says his son-in-law, Roper,
" t h a t the King's demands were clean overthrown, and it was
brought word to the King that a beardless boy had disappointed
all his purpose." The King gained only <£30,000, one-third less
he demanded. What wonder, then, that after this the King's
wrath should follow the family of More, picking a quarrel with
the father, and so threatening the son as to oblige him to retire
for some time into seclusion. He remained in retirement from
1504 to 1505, and it is during this period that he went
through a phase very natural to a simple ideal nature. He
thought of becoming a monk, of living in the cloister, true to
those principles whose exercise brought struggle and ruin in
practical life. He indulged in that asceticism which the Church
thought necessary to purify and discipline the corrupt body, and
to make it^the true servant of the soul. It was then that he took
to " that inner sharp shirt of hair," which he wore all his life,
sending it a few days before his death, " not willing to have it
seen," says Roper, " t o my wife, his dearly beloved daughter,
. . . and he used also sometimes to punish his body with
whippes, the cords knotted." Probably this phase was cut short
by the beginning of his friendship with Colet, who came to
London to take his duties at St. Paul's in 1504. To Colet he
soon became deeply attached. In one of his absences he writes
to him : " Meanwhile I shall spend my time with Grocyn, Linacre,
and Lilly" (Lilly, the grammarian, had'been one of his earliest

CHAP, ii.] ITS WORK m SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 27

friends, and had shared with him the wish to become a monk).
" The first is director of my life in your absence, the second is
master of my studies, and the third my most dear companion."
As he began again to study Greek, and had for his greatest friend a man whose fiercest zeal was directed against the
formalism and degeneration of the monastic class, the idea
of the cloister began to lose its hold on him. Monasticism, he
found, did not solve the problem of life. He saw that the solution of it was not found in the separation of the spiritual from
the worldly life, but in their reconciliation, in the compromise
between the ideal and the actual. He began to study and
translate some of the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was
specially interested in his letters to his nephew, which are indeed
the autobiography of this man, who united the most fervent
Christian piety with that enthusiasm for humane studies which
came in with the Renaissance. He read how Pico scourged
his own flesh in remembrance of the passion and death that
Christ suffered for his sake; how he always bore in mind the
thought that " the Son of God died for thee, and thou thyself
shalt die shortly ;" but at the same time he saw how Pico still
was concerned with practical life; how he never wished to shirk
its duties, never lost his interest in i t ; how he prayed that he
might not so embrace Martha as utterly to forget Mary; and
how, in spite of the warning of Savonarola, he remained a layman
to the end. In 1505 More's decision to embrace a practical life
was emphasized by his marriage; and Roper tells us as an
instance of his tact and consideration how he turned away his
affection from a younger daughter, who was the most attractive,
towards the elder, fearing that she might feel hurt if her younger
sister were preferred before her. During the remainder of
Henry VII.'s life he lived in a state of continual fear; but when
on April 23, 1509, Henry VII. died and Henry VIII. came to
the throne, and a new regime began marked by the execution of
Empson and Dudley, More was appointed under-sheriff in the
city. Much was hoped by the New Learning of the young King.
Erasmus pays him the highest compliment in his power when,
sending him The Christian Prince, he speaks of him "as
delighting in the converse of learned and prudent men,
especially of those who did not know how to speak just what
they thought would please." Their hopes were not entirely
disappointed. " Much of the new life of English literature was
due," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, " to the patronage of the new
King." Much of the stimulus to study Greek and Latin was

28

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. II.

given by him; and on one occasion when an Oxford divine had
been preaching against the study of Greek, he silenced him for
the future by saying, " the students will do well to devote themselves with energy and spirit to the study of Greek literature;"
and when there was called before him a preacher who had
stigmatised all who studied Greek as heretics, and excused himself by saying he was carried away by the Spirit, the King
replied, "the spirit was not the Spirit of Christ but the spirit of
foolishness," and forbade him ever again to preach at Court.
More presented to the King on his accession some congratulatory verses; yet although he shared the hopes of the New
Learning, and accepted office under him, he showed himself
by no means servile. He refused, a few years later, a pension
offered him by the Government; and in the city, in his public
career, he was remarkable for the impartiality of his dealings
in the suits between King and subject,—an impartiality which
was only equalled by his disinterestedness in his own profession.
He always tried to bring about a friendly agreement before going
to law, and would never undertake any cause that he did not consider just. His reputation for uprightness, joined to his business
capacity, caused him to be much sought after. When Erasmus
impatiently demands letters of him, he replies that he is constantly engaged in grave affairs. He is frequently closeted with
the Lord Chancellor; and his son-in-law Roper says " there was
at that time in none of the Prince's Courts of the Law of the
realm any matter of importance in controversy wherein he was
not one with part of the council;" he acquired experience and
tact in the management of the King. " Tell him what he ought
to do," he says to Cromwell, " and not what he can do, for if he
knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him."
It was in the intervals of such business he wrote his History of
Richard III.
In 1515 he was sent with others on an embassy
to settle a quarrel between England and the Netherlands, and
was chosen specially to represent the interests of the merchants
of London. In the course of this quarrel Parliament, to revenge
itself on the Netherlands, had forbidden the exportation of wool
from Norfolk to Holland and Zealand. The settlement of the
dispute was therefore very important to the trading classes of
England. It was during this embassy that More conceived the
idea of writing the Utopia. On his return the success of his
conduct in the embassy, together with the cleverness and ingenuity he displayed in defending the rights of the Pope with
regard to a ship which the King claimed in forfeiture, caused

CHAP, ii.] ITS WOEK m SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 29
Henry " no longer to forbear his services." The King had so far
changed his warlike policy as to give up his designs on France,
and enter into alliance with i t ; and More, believing in the good
intentions of the King, overcame his reluctance to accept office—
a reluctance of which he gives the reasons in the first book of the
Utopia. Years afterwards he reminds the King " of those most
godly words which his highness did speak unto him at his first
coming into his noble service,—the most virtuous lesson that
ever a prince taught his servant, willing him first to look to God,
and after God to him." During the term of his office we see
him uniformly independent and upright. Three things More
strove for in his political career,—universal peace, uniformity of
religion, and the King's marriage. "Now would to God, son
Roper, upon condition three things were well established in
Christendom, I were put in a sack and presently cast into the
Thames." In 1530 he resigns the Chancellorship, foreboding
differences which would arise between him and the King when
the Acts of Supremacy and Succession, then in contemplation,
were passed. These Acts tended to advance none of his objects.
More, as a disciple of the New Learning, eager for reform, but
faithful to the Church, could not but disapprove of this hurried
and complete separation from Eome, still less could he admit the
King's right to settle the divorce on his own authority. Nor
could he approve of a marriage which, instead of advancing the
King's amicable relationship with the states of Europe, would
plunge him into dissensions.
And thus More, refusing to take the oaths attached to these
Acts, suffered martyrdom. He underwent it with a cheerful
spirit, untinged by bitterness or doubt; and surely no martyr had
put before him so strongly that commonplace side of facts which
seems to rob martyrdom of all its heroism and glory. He was
visited in prison by his second wife, " a simple woman, and
somewhat worldly too," whom he had married in 1515 for the
sake of his children. " I marvel," she says to him, " that you
that have always hitherto been considered so wise a man will
now so play the fool as to be in this close filthy hole when you
might be abroad at liberty if you would only do as all the
bishops and learned men have done. . . . Why not return to
the right farye house at Chelsea V—" I pray thee, good mother
Alice," he answered, " tell me one thing—is not this house as
nigh heaven as mine own 1"
On the 6th of July 1535 his pure and upright life closed.
His age, as incapable of understanding his high aims and pur-

30

.THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

poses as his wife, passed judgment .on him thus: " I t is much
to be lamented of all," says Eobynson, the translator of the
Utopia, " and not only of us Englishmen, that a man of so incomparable witte, of so profound knowledge, of so absolute
learning, and of so fine eloquence, was yet, nevertheless, so much
blinded, rather with obstinacie than with ignorance, that he
could not or rather would not see the shining light of God's Holy
Truth in certain principal points of Christian religion : but did
rather choose to persevere and continue in his wilful and stubborn
obstinacie even to the very death."
The matter of the Utopia has a threefold interest for us. It
not only embodies the spirit of criticism on social and political
affairs, distinctive of this earliest phase of the English Eenaissance,—it not only reveals the mind of the author, rare in its
sympathy and originality,—but it gives by its satire that corroboration of historical, political, and social fact so valuable from a
contemporary.
The first book is concerned with the conversation between
More and the traveller Eaphael Hythloday, the second with
Eaphael's description of the Commonwealth, which had so charmed
him in his travels. The first book has perhaps the greatest
historical interest, as speaking plainly and directly of the conditions of things at the time, and showing the actual nature of
the relations between the King and More. It was written after
the second book in 1516, when Wolsey was urging him to enter
the royal service. It is supposed that he wished to show in this
book how severely he judged the state of the realm, how severely
he censured the King's action; that he could not change these
views if he accepted office under the King; and that he would
never accept a post under Government unless there was a possibility of modifying the King's action. In both books More
attempts to give reality and force to his conceptions by describing
every detail of his fictitious personages and his fictitious Commonwealth with an appearance of great precision and accuracy. He
tries thus to supply the place of that glowing and vivid imagination which an author in a work like this must have, if he wishes
to make it attractive and carry the reader along with him.
The book opens with the meeting of More while on his
embassy with a stranger, " a man well stricken in years, with a
black sun-burned face, with a long beard, and a cloak cast
homely about his shoulders " . . . " a man who had sailed, not
indeed as the mariner Palinure, but as the expert and prudent
prince, Ulysses—yea, rather as the ancient and sage philosopher

CHAP, ii.] ITS WORK IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM.

31

Plato. To this man, Eaphael Hythloday, More is introduced by
his friend, Peter Giles, "and in my garden upon a bench covered
with green bowes we sat down talking together." The travels
of Raphael were no common travels. "Nothing is more easy to
be found," he says, " than baiting Scyllas, ravenyng Celenes and
Lestrigones, devourers of people, and such-like great and incredible monsters." His travels did not result, like those of Sir
J. Mandeville, in the discovery of savage tribes protecting themselves from the sun by their one large multitudinous toed foot,
or in the discovery of Eve's apple, or the serpent's tooth. This
is common, " but to find citizens ruled by good and wholesome
laws, that is an exceeding rare and hard thing." He had,
indeed, found many "fond and foolish laws" in these new-found
lands, but also many good ones, and " h e rehearsed divers acts
and constitutions, whereby these our cities and nations may take
example to amend their errors."
The extent of his experience and his capacity for expounding
it move More's admiration. Surely, he says, " I wonder greatly
why you get you not into some king's court. For I am sure
there is no prince living who would not be very glad of you as a
man not only able to delight him with examples, but help him
with counsels. And thus doing you shall bring yourself in a
very good case, and also be of ability to help all your friends and
kinsfolk . . . and it is the highest way that you can devise to
bestow your time fruitfully . . . and this you shall never so
well do as if you be of some great prince's counsel." Probably,
when these arguments had been urged to More himself he had
answered in the same words that he puts into the mouth of
Raphael: " You be twice deceived, Master More, first in me and
again in the thing itself. For neither is in me the ability that
you force upon me, and if it were never so much, yet in disquieting mine own quietness, I should nothing further the weal
public. For first of all, the most part of all princes have more
delight in warlike matters and feats of chivalry (the knowledge
whereof I neither have nor desire) than in the good feats of
peace, and employ much more study how by right or by wrong
to enlarge their dominions, than how well and peaceable to rule
and govern that they have already." In England the social
confusion which was the result of such policy was then at its
height, and was only increased by the remedies applied. The
King, anxious to recover what he called " his very true patrimony,"
had spent three years in active warfare. In the years 1512,
1513, 1514, the revenues of more than twelve ordinary years had

32

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP, IL

been paid away, the hoards of Henry VII. had been squandered.
" In 1515 even the subservient commons showed symptoms of discontent; they complained that whereas the King's noble progenitor had maintained his estate and the defence of the realm
out of the ordinary revenue of the kingdom, he now, by reason
of the improvident grants made by him since he came to the
throne, had not sufficient revenue left to meet his increasing
expenses. All unusual grants of annuities were declared void,
and in the coming year an income-tax of sixpence, descending
even to farm-labourers, was to be twice repeated in order to
cover arrears. This Parliament endeavoured also to interfere
with the wages of the labouring class, solely for the benefit of
the employers of labour. The drain upon the labour-market for
the supply of soldiers had caused a rise in wages : the last
Parliament had attempted to re-enact the old statute of labourers ;
this Parliament repeated the Act. Again, the scarcity of labour
made itself felt by the tendency of landowners to throw arable
land into pasture, involving sudden and cruel ejection of thousands
of peasantry. This was in part checked, but it was always possible for landowners to evade the check by compounding with
the King." The result of all this was increase of crime, increase
of executions among the lower classes; while the luxury and extravagance of the upper classes grew, stimulated and encouraged
by the influence of Italy. At the table of Cardinal Morton,
Eaphael says, the conversation had turned on the social evils of
the day, and he had given it as his opinion that any conscientious
minister, anxious for the welfare of his country, must, if he wished
to improve the state of the country, check his sovereign in his
fatal desire for war. All social reforms for their success must
depend on the King's relinquishment of his schemes of ambition.
The remedies suggested by him for improving the condition of
the lower classes, and reducing the vagabond element, were
also on the principle that prevention is the best cure; the engrossings of the rich must be restrained, fewer persons bred up
in idleness, tillage-farming must be restored, honest employment
found for thieves. There is no use, he says, in severe laws : they
never can work any reform, not going to the root of the matter;
capital punishment is in itself a sin. " God commands us that we
shall not kill." It is doubly wrong to impose death for a small
offence. Even Moses's law only punished theft by purse and not
by death. " All the goods in the world are not able to countervail
a man's life." But, says Raphael, supposing I took office and
suggested to the King that the example of the Achorians should

CHAP. ii. ] ITS WORK m SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 33
be followed, who under similar circumstances (their king desiring
to conquer and govern another nation) refused to be governed
by half a king, and insisted that their king should choose which
of the two kingdoms he should govern, how would such counsel
be received ? Also supposing when the question of taxes was
raised, " one proposing to tamper with the currency, another the
pretence of immediate war and then declaration of peace, a third
the exaction of penalties under old obsolete statutes, a fourth the
prohibition of such things as are against the public interest, and
the granting of licenses for sums of money, a fifth the securing of
judges on the side of the royal prerogative,-—how if I should come
and say that all these counsels were pernicious, that if a king
cannot do without these means he had better abdicate, that he
must put aside sloth and pride, live on his own revenue, accommodate expenditure to income, restrain crime, preventing it by
good laws rather than punish it."
" These and such other
informations, if I should use among men wholly inclined and
given to the contrary part, how deaf hearers, think you, should
I have."
Thus the first book concludes with an expression of the hopelessness of attempting reform.
In the second book More, through the mouth of Eaphael
Hythloday, describes his ideal of a Commonwealth, and makes
the description the vehicle of satire on contemporary customs and
institutions. As Mr. Seebohm says, " this method of criticism was
a safe one, for to object in any way to the Utopia was to admit
the truth of its insinuations." He had thus chosen as ingenious
a method for expressing his views, as Erasmus had through the
mouth of Folly. In More's descriptions of the customs and of the
political and intellectual life of the Utopians is intended that
satire which comes from the direct contrast of the ideal with the
actual. Politically, the government of the Utopians is democratic:
every thirty families elect them yearly an officer called a syphograunte or a philarche, chosen from the learned class, and exempted
legally from labour, but not availing themselves of this privilege,
to the intent to give a good example. Every syphograunte, with
his thirty families, is under an officer called the chief philarche
or tranibore, chosen yearly, but not lightly deposed. The prince
is elected by the syphograuntes, who number 200; they choose
from among four men, who have been selected by the people for
this object. The prince holds his office all his lifetime unless he
is deposed for " suspicion " of tyranny. " The tranibores, every
third day, and sometimes oftener if need be, come into the
D

34

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

Council House with the king : they take with them two syphograuntes, whom they change each time; and nothing touching
the Commonwealth shall be confirmed or ratified unless it have
been debated three days in the Council before it be decreed. It
is death to have any consultation for the Commonwealth out of
the Council." In the course of the debate syphograuntes are consulted, who again consult their families, and when they have
consulted they tell the decision to the Council. This sketch of
self-government in Utopia implied a severe criticism on the action
of the Tudor kings; on the long and frequent intervals in the
summoning of Parliament; its packed composition when it
was summoned; its coercion if it was not servile enough to
meet the caprice of the king; the utter disregard with which he
treated not only the popular voice in political affairs, but the
opinion of Parliament and of his ministers. Nowhere is there
a better illustration of the importance and power of the
caprice of kings than in the history of the Tudor despotism.
More indeed wrote before the Eeformation, before the Act of
Supremacy; but the way in which the Eeformation, this supremely
important legal and ecclesiastical movement, was brought about
to gratify the whim of the king in love with a pretty maid of
honour, is but characteristic of Henry's general policy. But in
Utopia everything was to be subordinate to the welfare of the
people. The prince was general superintendent of the life of the
people, with great controlling but no despotic power. The local
officers seem to have had most to d o ; it is they " who take care
that no man sit idle; that every one apply himself with earnest
diligence; and yet that no one is to be wearied from early in
the morning till late in the evening with continual work, like
labouring and toiling beasts." If Utopian human nature were
at all stubborn, or inclined to have its own way, it is they who
would have had to deal with it.
Their economic arrangements are as befits a people so despotically democratic. Property is held entirely in common, not
only property in land, but all worldly possessions. The doors of
the houses have no locks or bolts; " whoso will may go in, for
there is nothing within the houses that is private or any man's
own;" every tenth year they change their houses by lot; and
only in the matter of gardening is there a slight field allowed
for the exercise of the spirit of competition. " Their studie and
diligence herein cometh not only of pleasure but of a certain
strife and contention that is between street and street concerning
the trimming, husbanding, and furnishing of the gardens." In

CHAP, IL] ITS WORK IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 35
all other points a deadly uniformity is aimed at. The five cities
of the island, large and fair, agreeing in tongue, manners, institutions, and laws, " are all set and situate alike, and in all points
fashioned alike." Each city has never less than thirty miles of
ground, and in the country round it each city has houses or
farms built, well appointed, and furnished with tools; every
house having forty persons, men and women, and two bondmen.
Every thirty farms or families have one head ruler, who sees
that all work sufficiently, save those who are too weak or ill, or
in some other way unqualified or exempted, as are those who
belong to the learned class. Life is to be diversified by the
regular interchange of inhabitants between town and country.
Out of every family in the city twenty persons are sent, and the
vacancies are filled up by inhabitants from the country. " No
man," Eaphael says, "is constrained to leave the town;" but
the Utopians have such well-regulated minds that they like
everything that it is proper for them to do, and " most have great
pleasure and delight in husbandrie." They produce much more
than is necessary for the subsistence of the country, " parting
the overplus among the borderers." Every man is brought up to
his father's craft, unless he shows a decided aptitude for some
other. All work only nine hours, and when they have made
sufficient store for themselves, " which they think not done until
they have provided for the two years following, then of those
things whereof they have abundance,—grain, honey, wool, flax,
madder, etc.,—they carry forth into other countries great plenty;
and the seventh part of all these things they give frankly and
freely to the poor of the country. The residue they sell at a
reasonable and meane price. By this trade of traffic they bring
into their own country all such things as they lack at home,
which is almost nothing but iron. They care not whether they
are paid for ready money or else upon trust," and so rich are they
" that the most part of it they never ask . . . for that thing
which is to them no profit, to take it from others to whom it is
profitable, they think it no right or conscience." The purpose
of what store they have is to hire mercenaries in case of warlike
emergencies.
All economic law and reason is reversed by the Utopians with
reference to gold and silver : they give an artificial inferiority to
gold, " by all means possible procuring to have gold and silver
among them in reproach and infamy, making it the plaything
of their children, the fetters of their criminals;" and Eaphael
illustrates this point and the success of their custom by " the

36

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

very pleasant tale of the ambassadors of the Anemolians." The
reaction against the wealth that had come in with the Kenaissance, the belief that wealth consists entirely in gold and silver,—
that to disregard it means to disregard wealth,—is apparent in
More's desire to show how the Utopian sets no store by gold or
silver.
The international relations of the Utopians are equally singular, but show an equally commendable purpose. " They count it
a most just cause of war when any people holdeth a piece of
ground void and vacant to no good or profitable use, keeping
other men from the use and possession;" they themselves, if
they are too numerous, found colonies on what is unemployed,
and if resisted, they make it a cause of war. Other causes of
war are the defence of their own country, the ejection out of a
friend's land of the enemies that have invaded it, or the deliverance from the yoke and bondage of tyranny some people that be
therewith oppressed. '' They rej oice and avaunt themselves if they
vanquish and oppress their enemies by craft and deceit,—that is
to say, by the might and puissance of wit, for with bodily
strength, say they, bears, lions, wolves, and dogs, and other wild
beasts, do fight." They issue proclamations promising great
rewards to him that will kill their enemies' princes. If they cannot prevail by raising up internal dissensions, etc., " then they
raise up the people that be next neighbours and borderers to
their enemies." When they actually do go to war they hire
soldiers chiefly of the tribe of Zapolites, a hideous, savage, fierce,
and wild tribe living in the mountains, " who maintain their life
by seeking their death. . . . And the Utopians like, as they
seek good men to use well, so they seek these evil and vicious
men to abuse. They believe that they should do a very good
deed for all mankind if they could rid out of the world all that
foul stinking den of that most wicked and cursed people." As
before war they resort to stratagem, so in war they prefer
ambushes and stratagems to open fighting, hoping thus to prevent loss of life. "Engines for war they devise, and invent
wonders wittily," holding that the severer the rules and the
weapons of war the less barbarous it is, since it makes people
think twice before entering on it, and when once begun it is
soonest over. Truces for a short time " they do firmly and faithfully keep; leagues they never make. . . . For what purpose serve
leagues, say they, as though nature had not set sufficient love
between man and man; and whoso regardeth not nature, think
you that he will pass for words 1" Then follows a passage of

CHAP, IL] ITS WORK m SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 37
that clumsy satire which consists in saying exactly the opposite of
what is meant. Raphael speaks in exaggerated praise of the
international morality of Europe: " For here in Europe, and
especially in those parts where the faith and religion of Christ
reigneth, the majestie of leagues is everywhere esteemed holy
and inviolable, partly through the justice and goodness of princes,
and partly at the reverence and motion of the head bishop;" and
concludes with words showing that his idea of international
intercourse was indeed Utopian in the sense of being unattainable. " The Utopians think that the fellowship of nature be a
strong league, and that men be better and more surely knit
together by love and benevolence than by covenants and leagues,
by hearty affection of mind than by words." The federation of
the world is Utopian in the nineteenth century: what must it
not have been then in the sixteenth ?
The description of the intellectual and moral condition of the
Utopians is the most interesting part of the book. Raphael says,
" How much more wit is in the heads of the Utopians than of the
common sort of Christians; . . . in the exercise and study of the
mind they be never weary; they have a wonderful aptness for
learning; in less than three years' space there was nothing in the
Greek tongue they lacked." As no man in Utopia labours to
excess, there is always for every one time to spend in learning.
Both men and women are encouraged to attend lectures; no one
is compelled, but a certain inducement is given by the fact that
those who distinguish themselves by capacity and industry are
placed in a learned class exempt from work,—a class from which
the syphograuntes and other officers of dignity are chosen.
" They be taught learning in their own native tongue, for it is
both copious in words and pleasant to the ear, and for the utterance of a man's mind very perfect and sure." He compares their
learning with that of the ancients. In music, logic, arithmetic,
and geometry, they have found out in a manner all that our
ancient philosophers have taught. Then follows " a nipping
taunt." But, he says, they have not devised one of all those
rules of restrictions, complications, and suppositions very wittily
invented in the small logicals which here our children in every
place do learn. They were never yet able to find out the second
intentions, i.e. " the terms which express the modes in which the
mind regards the first intention;" in other words, they made no
attempt to realise the essence of the thing apart from the thing
itself; " none of them all could ever see man in common, as they
call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than ever was a giant,

38

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. I I .

and pointed to even with our finger." Thus More takes revenge
on those who had attempted to teach him to distinguish the
essence of man, "man in common," apart from the individual
man. The Utopians lose themselves in no mystic astrological
knowledge \ " the amities and dissensions of the planets and all
that deceitful divination of the stars they never as much as
dreamed thereof." They love, indeed, to contemplate nature,
and the marvellous and gorgeous frame of the world; they study
the human frame, and think much of the science of physic, but
all superstitious learning, and all barren and contentious learning,
they utterly contemn. But it is in philosophy that they chiefly
exercise their minds. " They dispute of the good qualities of
the soiil and of the body and of fortune . . . they reason of
virtue and pleasure. Felicity is the end of life, and felicity
includes every motion or state of the mind wherein man hath
naturally delectation." They judge it extreme madness to follow
sharp and painful virtue, and not only to banish the pleasure of
life, but also willingly to suffer grief without any hope of profit
thereof ensuing . . . they count divers kinds of pleasures, some
of the soul, some of the body. To the soul they give intelligence
and that delectation that cometh of the contemplation of truth.
The pleasure of the body they divide into two parts. The first
is when delectation is sensibly felt and perceived. The second
part of bodily pleasure, they say, is that which consisteth and
resteth in the quiet and upright state of the body. The pleasures
of the mind are superior to those of the body, and the chief part
of these pleasures they think "doth come of the exercise of
virtue and conscience of good life." It is a sin to sacrifice a
greater pleasure for a smaller; the pleasure of others is to be
regarded as important as our own, and in taking our pleasure we
must always consider that we do not give others displeasure;
also to draw something from self to give to others is a point of
humanity and gentleness which never taketh away so much commodity which it bringeth,—:the conscience of a good deed giving
the highest pleasure to the mind. Thus the philosophy of the
Utopians, which opens with pagan and epicurean maxims, is
brought round to the standard of Christian ethics. More has
reconciled the Christian and pagan ideals by a course of reasoning which appealed to his sympathetic mind. But against the
doctrine of asceticism the Utopians set their face; "for it is to
the wealth and profit of no man to punish himself, to the intent
he may be able courageously to suffer adversitie, which perchance
shall never come to him . . . they do think it (asceticism) a

CHAP, ii.] ITS WORK E T SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISM. 39
S
point of extreme madness, and a token of a man cruelly-minded
towards himself and unkind towards nature, as one so disdaining
to be in her favour, that he renounceth and refuseth all her
benefits." But More shows a certain tenderness towards those
who spend their lives in good works, despising worldly ties.
Thus, in speaking of the two sects who devote their lives to good
works, one mixing with the world, the other not, he calls the
first the wiser, the second the holier.
The intellectual condition of the Utopians being thus cultivated, it follows that there was great diversity and great toleration in their religion. All agree in believing that there is one
chief and principal God, the maker and ruler of the whole world,
called by different names, but all designating according to different
conceptions that certain godly power, "unknown, everlasting,
incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach
of man's wit, dispersed throughout all the world, not in bigness,
but in virtue and power. . . . Every man has choice and free
liberty to believe what he would : savyng that he (Kyng Utopus,
the founder of this Commonwealth) earnestly and straitly charged
them that no man should conceive so ill and base an opinion of
the dignitie of man's nature, as to think that the soules do die
and perish with the body, or that the world runneth at all
a ventures governed by no divine providence." " If such an unbeliever there be, he is excluded from all honours." " Howbeit
they put him to no punishment, because they be persuaded that
it is in no man's power to believe what he list." On these broad
principles were the lives of the Utopians modelled, and we see
them, an excellent yet somewhat dull people, living their wholesome and ordered life, " in the present sight and under the eyes
of every man," dining together in large halls at the set hours of
dinner and supper. The women cook and seethe and dress the
meat, and at table the elders with their sage gravity keep the
younger from wanton license of words and behaviour, while they
divide the dainties as they think best to those young ones on
each side of them. Dinner and supper begin with the reading
of something that pertaineth to good manners and virtue \ afterwards harmless luxuries are indulged in, " concettis " and junkets,
with the burning of sweet gums and spices and perfumes.
While the Utopians are at work they are dressed in leather
or skins that will last seven years. When they go abroad they
wear a cloak which hides their homely apparel. This cloak is
all of one colour, which is the natural colour of the wool. In
linen cloth they have regard only to whiteness, in woollen only

40

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

to cleanliness. They would think attention spent on their
clothes, on the material, colour, and fashioning of the same, a
waste of strength; " they prefer to withdraw from bodily service
to the free liberty of the mind and the garnishing of the same."
They despise counterfeit pleasures, foolish honours, vain nobility;
they spend little in ornament, delighting as much in imitation
as in genuine precious stones, thinking that the opinion and
fancy of people doth augment and diminish the price and estimation of precious stones.
The plays and games of the sensible people are also profitable.
After supper they bestow one hour in play : some exercise themselves in music, some in a favourite game, which is a sort of
chess, where vices fight with virtues, " i n which game is very
properly showed both the strife and discord that vices have
among themselves, and again their unity and concord against
virtue." Of hunting as a pastime they have no opinion; they
call it the vilest of all pastimes, for they believe that animals
have immortal souls, and they therefore think it as wrong to
take away their life as they would the life of any human being.
The Utopians have much humanity, but no superstitious
reverence for life; they would even countenance the custom of
Euthanasia, condemned by many of the modern world. They
think it right for a man to end his life, if it is humanly certain
that it must be spent in pain and disease. Only bondmen are
allowed to be butchers. " For they permit not their free citizens
to accustom themselves to the killing of beasts, through the use
whereof they think clemency, the gentlest affection of our nature,
by little and little to decay and perish."
" I must nedes confess and grant," says Eaphael in conclusion,
" that many things be in the Utopian weal public which in our
own cities I may rather wish for than hope after," and it is a
confirmation of his opinion that the word Utopian has been
adopted into the English language as signifying the desired but
the unattainable.
Sir Philip Sidney approving, as he must needs do, of a book
that has for aim " to teach virtue by feigning," yet cannot help
implying that he thinks the Utopia a failure; the dull, uniform
life which it describes being to him no ideal. Indeed, excellent
and praiseworthy as these people are in their views and ways,
their life is oppressive and monotonous. We feel that the
Utopian would die out,—that their uniform, regulated existence
would produce the passive type, not the energetic active type
which is essential to progress, and which is nourished on diversity.

CHAP, I L ]

ITS WORK 1 T EDUCATION.
S

41

More's Utopia is indeed duller than the ideal of the severest
socialist; it is a picture of the stationary state which leaves
nothing to be hoped for, in all senses of the term. The book is
itself charming because it reveals the simplicity, delicacy, and
refinement of the mind that wrote it \ it is at all times a most
efficient vehicle for satire—on the tyranny and despotism of the
king, on the luxury and idleness of the nobility, on the frightful
international immorality of Europe, caused by the caprice and
ambition of kings careless of human life, on religion and science
alike fruitless and barren, careless of result in practice, on the
absence of toleration, on the extravagance, carelessness, and
irresponsibility of the upper classes—but the society of which it
gives a picture is a most unstimulating ideal; its healthy, comfortable, completely regulated life could only nourish mediocrity.

PART III.—Its Work in Education.
ASCHAM,' Roger, b. 1515 ; studies at St. John's College, Cambridge ; made
public orator; appointed Latin secretary and classical tutor to
Princess Elizabeth, 1554 ; d. 1568.—Toxophilus written, 1544.—The
Schoolmaster published, 1570.

A review of the New Learning would not be at all complete
without noticing what was perhaps its greatest practical achievement, viz. its educational work. Apart from the general stimulus
/which it gave to thought and intellectual life, it made a very
definite reform by supplanting the old system of education,
invented and conducted by the Schoolmen, by a new system
making classics the foundation and the aim of all education, and
employing a more humane and gentle method in the process
of instilling them into the pupil. I t is this system—first
originated when the classics alone represented humanism as
opposed to scholasticism—that has held its ground to our own
day. I t is only now being gradually modified by that view
which conceives other subjects to be of equal value as training,
and of greater value as a preparation, for the business of life.
In 1510 Colet had founded St, PauPs School. I t was his intention that in this school should be taught good literature, both
Latin and Greek. The works of such authors " as have with
wisdom joined pure chaste eloquence," specially Christian
authors who wrote their " wisdom in clean and chaste Latin,
whether in prose or verse." " M y interest in this school,"
he said, " is specially to increase the knowledge and the wor-

42

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEABNING.

[CHAP. II.

shipping of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, and good Christian
life and manners, to the children." In this school Latin and
Greek were made the elements of education, and the process of
teaching was conducted with mildness and gentleness, instead of
with that roughness and severity which teachers on the scholastic
method had thought it necessary to employ in order to prepare
youth for a life, which in these ages was but a painful and weary
struggle, in which the only virtues were endurance and selfsacrifice. Thus youth from the beginning must be trained to
endure pain. Erasmus, in a work written to expose and hold
up to public scorn the private schools of his time, including
those of monasteries and colleges, to which parents as a matter
of course sent their children, tells a story which illustrates the
nature of the discipline every right-minded teacher considered it
necessary to employ. " I once knew a divine, a man of reputation, who seemed to think that no cruelty to scholars could be
enough, since he never would have any but flogging masters.
He thought this was the only way to crush the boys' unruly
spirits and to subdue the wantonness of their age. Never did he
take a meal with his flock without making the comedy end in
tragedy, so at the end of the meal one or another boy was
dragged out to be flogged. . . . I myself was once by, when after
dinner as usual he called out a boy, I should think about ten years
old. He had only just come fresh from his mother to school. His
mother, it should be said, was a poor woman, and had specially
commended the boy to him. But he at once began to charge
the boy with unruliness, since he could think of nothing else,
and must find something to flog him for, and made signs to the
proper official to flog him. Whereupon the poor boy was forthwith flogged then and there, and flogged as though he had committed sacrilege. The divine turned round to me and said, ' he
did nothing to deserve it, but the boy's spirit must be subdued.'"
The boys in Colet's school were to be drawn to study by
liking and inclination, and if there was ever any possibility of
confounding Colet with the divine of whom Erasmus told the
story, this possibility must be removed by the preface which
Colet wrote to his little Latin grammar. It was this grammar
which superseded Linacre's, and which, with additions made by
Erasmus and Lilly, was ultimately known as Lilly's Grammar.
In writing this little book Colet said that he had studied clearness
and simplicity above all: " Judging that nothing may be too
soft nor too familiar for little children specially learning a tongue
with them at all strange; in which little book I have left

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IN EDUCATION.

43

many things out on purpose, considering the tenderness and
capacity of small minds. . . . Wherefore I pray you all, little
babes, all little children, learn gladly this little treatise and
commend it diligently unto your memories, trusting of this
beginning ye shall proceed and grow to perfect literature, and
come at the last to be great clerks. And lift up your little
white hands for me, which prayeth for you to God, to whom
be all honour and imperial majesty and glory."
Colet also endeavoured to raise the position of those who
taught, and Erasmus explains what was the high ideal held by
the school of the New Learning, with regard to the duties of this
profession. " In order that the teacher might be thoroughly up
to his work, he should not merely be a master of one particular
branch of study. He should himself have travelled through the
whole circle of knowledge. In philosophy he should have
studied Plato and Aristotle, Theophrastus and Plotinus; in
theology the Sacred Scriptures, and after them Origen,
Chrysostom, and Basil among the Greek fathers, and Ambrose
and Jerome among the Latin fathers; among the poets, Homer
and Ovid; in geography, which is very important in the study
of history, Pomponius, Mela, Ptolemy, Pliny, Strabo. He should
know what ancient names of rivers and mountains, countries,
cities, answer to the modern ones; and the same of trees, animals,
instruments, clothes, and gems, with regard to which it is incredible how ignorant even educated men are. He should take
note of little facts about agriculture, architecture, military
and culinary acts, mentioned by different authors. He should
be able to trace the origin of words, their gradual corruption in
the languages of Constantinople, Italy, and France. Nothing
should be beneath his observation which can illustrate history or
the meaning of poets." It is not known whether this ideal
was realised by Lilly, the grammarian, the godson of Grocyn,
who had learnt Latin in Italy, Greek in the East, who had
travelled to Jerusalem, and Rhodes, but he it was who was
chosen to be headmaster of Colet's school. He was without
doubt one of the most cultivated men of his time, and Colet, duly
acknowledging the value of his services, gave him a salary of
£35 a year, a sum which meant a great deal in those days, when
the value of money was so much greater than it is now; the
occupant of the most dignified post in the kingdom, the Lord
Chancellor, only receiving £133 a year, including the perquisites
of his office.
Colet and Erasmus, in exalting the dignity of the teaching

44

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. II.

profession, had, however, to struggle against much prejudice.
Even when Bacon, in the seventeenth century, published The
Advancement of Learning\ the importance of the profession had
not been thoroughly vindicated. One of the aspersions cast
by the prejudice of the time on learned men was that they occupied themselves with the meanest of all employments, the
education of youth. " But how unjust this traducement is (if you
will reduce things from popularity of opinion to measure of
reason) may appear in that we see, men are more curious what
they put into a new vessel than into a vessel seasoned, and what
mould they lay about a young plant than about a plant corroborate, so as the weakest terms and times of all things use to have
the best applications and helps." But " things " at the time of
the New Learning had not been reduced even by cultivated minds
to " measure of reason." Erasmus, when Professor of Greek at
Cambridge, helped Colet to find an undermaster for his school.
He relates a conversation he had with a divine of the University.
"Who," said this divine, "would put up with the life of a
schoolmaster if he could get a living in any other way VJ Erasmus
replied that he thought the education of youth one of the most
honourable of all callings; " there can be no labor more pleasing to God than the Christian training of boys." The divine
replied : "If any one wants to give himself up entirely to Christ
let him go into a monastery. He must leave all worldly ties and
duties and follow Christ," he continued, ignoring Erasmus's reminder that St. Paul places true religion in works of charity:
" in forsaking all is found alone the true perfection of Christianity." " H e can scarcely be said to leave all," returned
Erasmus, " who, when he has a chance of doing good to others,
refuses the task because it is too humble in the eyes of the
world." And thus having had the last word, and " lest," as he
says, " I should get into a quarrel, I bade the man good-bye."
Colet's school became popular and flourishing, supported
almost entirely by Colet's money. It succeeded in spite of those
who marked it as a dangerous place, where was taught "heretical Greek." Colet is remarkable among liberal founders as
having had respect for the changing circumstances of the future,
and having left great discretionary liberty to those that came
after him in the disposal of funds and in the organisation of
the school. "Notwithstanding these statutes and ordinances
before written in which I have declared my mind and will: yet
because in time to come many things may and shall survive
and grow by many occasions and causes which by the making

CHAP. ii. ]

ITS WORK IN EDUCATION.

45

of this book was not possible to come to mind, trusting in the
assured truth and circumspect wisdom and faithful goodness of
the most honest and substantial fellowship of the mercery of
London. . . . Both all this that is said, and all that is not said
which hereafter shall come into my mind while I live to be said,
I leave it wholly to their discretion and charity." But the work
of Colet remained, altered only in details by posterity; his views
on education, both as to subject and to method, remained those
of posterity for three centuries.
A work which expounds the literary views of the New Learning is one of the first prose works written in English which
appeared at the beginning of the Eenaissance. Although Koger
Ascham was not born till 1515, and although the Schoolmaster
was not published till 1570, after his death, yet his book may
be considered a representative work of the New Learning, so
thoroughly does it reflect the educational views of Colet and
Erasmus, its aim being merely to put them into a popular form.
Ascham had come before the public as an author in 1545, when he
presented his Toxophilus, written in 1544, to the King. This
book in its subject and in its style showed direct traces of the
stimulus of the Eenaissance. It illustrates not only the interest
taken in physical culture, but also the healthy impulse that
classic culture had given to the cultivation of the native tongue.
In the preface Ascham says that " h e wishes to be read by all
the gentlemen and yeomen of England." He wishes to show
that the art of writing in English prose can be an art as well as
writing in Latin or Greek. There can be the same scholarly
care, the same choice and ordering of words. " H e that will
write well in any tongue must follow the counsel of Aristotle;
to speak as the common people do, and to think as wise men
do, and so should every man understand him, and the judgment
of wise men allow him." The book consists of two books of dialogue between Philologus and Toxophilus,—the first book containing several arguments to commend shooting, the second a
particular description of the art of shooting with the long-bow.
Ascham, in the treatment of his subject, shows that he was no
mediaeval mystic, holding that the soul shone more brightly
and purely in a thin and emaciated body, looking out of sunken
and hollow eyes. But physical culture, Ascham allowed, is only
one side of life : it is only one of the many requirements of the
human being. " Shooting," he says, " should be a waiter and not
a master over learning;" it is but a recreation,—a necessary one,
for the man who would be healthily developed,—but merely a

46

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. ir.

recreation, in no sense an aim in life. But it is much superior
to music, he says, for "music maketh a man's wit so soft, so
tender, so smooth, so quaisie, that he is less able to brook strong
and tough study." Shooting is upheld on the authority of the
classics; and the same support is sought by Ascham when he
seeks to justify himself in the eyes of-contemporaries for devoting
his attention to such a trivial subject as education. " Yet some
men, friendly enough of nature, but of small judgment and
learning, do think that I take too much pains, spend too much
time, in setting forth these children's affairs. But those good
men were never brought up in Socrates's school, who saith plainly,
' that no man goeth about a more goodly purpose than he that
is mindful of the good bringing up both of his own and other
men's children.'" " This last summer," he says, " I was in a
gentleman's house wThere a young child somewhat past four
years old could in no wise frame his tongue to say a little short
grace, and yet he could roundly rap out so many ugly oaths, and
those of the newest fashion, as some good man of fourscore
years old hath never heard named before: and that which was
most detestable of all, his father and mother would laugh at it.
I much doubt what comfort an other day this child shall bring
unto them. . . . And," he goes on to say, " it may be a great
wonder but a greater shame to us Christian men to understand
what a heathen writer Isocrates doth leave in memory of writing,
concerning the care that the noble city of Athens had to bring
up their youth in honest company and virtuous discipline, whose
talk in Greek is to this effect in English."
Isocrates tells how the city was not more careful to see their
young men well taught as well governed; he describes the care
they had to spread sound learning and to cultivate good manners
among the youth; he recounts the learned men that distinguished
Athens, the illustrious practical men the city brought forth.
"And now," says Ascham, "let Italian, and Latin itself, Spanish,
French, Dutch, and English, bring forth their learning and
recite their authors, Cicero only excepted, and one or two more
in Latin; they be all patched clouts and rags in comparison
of fair woven broadcloth. . . . The remembrance of such a
Commonwealth, using such discipline and order for youth, and
thereby bringing forth to their praise, and leaving to us for our
example such captains for war, such counsellors for peace, and
matchless masters for all kinds of learning, is pleasant for me to
recite, and not irksome, I trust, for others to hear, except it be
such as make neither count of virtue and learning." To those

CHAP, IL]

ITS WORK IN EDUCATION.

47

who respect the true dignity of learning he need not apologise
for this work, which deals with the right bringing up of youth,
—first, with the method by which it may be most easily drawn
to learning; secondly, with the best modes of learning the classic
tongues. He advocates mildness and praise in the teaching of
youth for several reasons—first, it is an inducement to learning;
it is better than that beating and severity which the Schoolmen
thought was the only means by which the child might be driven
to learn. " And one example, whether love or fear doth work
more in a child, for virtue and learning, I will gladly report,
which may be heard with some pleasure and followed with more
profit. Before I went into Germany I came to Brodegate in
Leicestershire, to take my leave of that noble Lady Jane Grey, to
whom I was exceeding much beholding. Her parents, the Duke
and the Duchess, with all the household, gentlemen and gentlewomen, were hunting in the park; I found her in her chamber,
reading Phsedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much
delight as some gentleman would read a merry tale in Boccaccio.
After salutation and duty done, with some other talk, I asked
her why she would lose such pastime in the park? Smiling
she answered me, I wisse all these sports is but a shadow to
that pleasure that I find in Plato: alas, good folk, they never
felt what the pleasure meant! And how came you, madam,
quoth I, to this deep knowledge of pleasure, and what did
chiefly allure you unto it, seeing not many women, but very few
men, have attained thereunto 2 ' I will tell you/ quoth she, ' and
tell you a troth which perchance ye will marvel at. One of the
greatest benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent me so
sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For
when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I
speak, keep silence, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be
sowyng, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it,
as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted,
so cruelly threatened, yea, presently sometimes with pinches,
nippes, and bobbes, and other ways which I will not name, for
the honor I bear them, so without measure misordered that I
think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer,
who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing whiles I am
with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping
because whatsoever I do else but learning is full of grief,
trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me: and thus my book

48

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING,

[CHAP. II.

hath been so much my pleasure and bringeth daily to me more
pleasure and more, that in respect of it, all other pleasures in
very deed be but trifles and troubles unto me.' I remember this
talk gladly, both because it is so worthy of memory, and because
also it was the last talk that ever I had, and the last time that
ever I saw, that noble and worthy lady."
If severity, says Ascham, is used indiscriminately, the child
is punished when not actually in fault, and the sense of this injustice is one of the most bitter griefs of childhood, and likely
to spoil the best of natures. Then again, by severity the
quickest and roughest wits are often rewarded, and these quick
and rough wits have by no means the best natures, and indeed,
success in life is often attained best by those who have slow
wits yet solid : " hard solid kind of wits often prove the best in
every kind of life."
When Ascham considers what best qualifies a child for learning,
we see how the ideal of the scholar has changed. The scholar
of the Canterbury tales—
' ' Was not right fat, I undertake
And loked hoi we and thereto soberly."
According to Ascham it is the full development of body and of
mind that best qualifies the human being for learning. " Euphues
is he that is apt by goodness of wit and applicable by readiness
of will to learning, having all other qualities of the mind and
parts of the body that must another day serve learning, not
troubled, mangled, and halved, but sound, full, whole, and able to
do their office; as a tongue not stammering or ever hardly drawing
forth words, but plain and ready to deliver the meaning of the
mind: a voice not soft, weak, piping, womanish, but audible,
strong, and manlike : a countenance not werish or crabbed, but
fair and comely, a personage not wretched and deformed, but
tall and goodly: for surely a lovely countenance with a goodly
stature giveth credit to learning and authority to the person.
. . . And how can a comely body be better employed than to
serve the greatest exercise of God's greatest gift, and that is
learning." Then, supported by the authority of Plato and
Socrates, he enumerates memory, love of learning, desire to
work and will to take pains, gladness to learn of others, boldness
in asking of questions, love of approbation, as desirable qualities
in the child who would be successful in intellectual life. " Plato
maketh it (memory) a separate and perfect note of itself :" the

CHAP. ii. ]

ITS WOKK m

EDUCATION.

49

test of a good memory consists in three properties; it must be
quick in receiving, sure in keeping, and ready in delivering forth
again. " Isocrates did cause to be written at the entry of the
school, in golden letters, this golden sentence, 6 If thou lovest
learning thou shalt attain to much learning.' . . . Aristotle uttered
these words in his Ehetorike ad Theodecten,—Liberty kindleth
love, love refuseth no labour, and labour obtaineth whatsoever it
seeketh; and Socrates added the fifth note: that a man must
not always trust to his own singular wit; he must be glad to
hear and learn of another. For otherwise he shall stick with
great trouble where he might go easily forward, and also catch
hardly a very little by his own toil, when he might gather quickly
a great deal by any other man's teaching. . . . And Socrates wisely
adds the sixth note, and that is, a natural boldness to ask any
question, desirous to search out any doubt; not ashamed to learn
of the meanest, not afraid to go to the greatest, until he be perfectly taught and fully satisfied ; and lastly, he must have a mind
wholly bent to win praise by so doing." " These," says Ascham,
" be no questions asked by Socrates, as doubts ; but these be sentences first affirmed by Socrates as mere trothes, and afterwards
given forth by Socrates as right rules most necessary to be marked,
and fit to be followed by all them that could have taught as they
should." And he adds, with great decision, " In this counsel,
judgement, and authority of Socrates I will repose myself, until I
meet with a man of the contrary mind whom I may justly take
to be wiser than I think Socrates was." Ascham then goes on to
treat of another point necessary to the well bringing up of youth.
" I wished before to have love of learning bred up in children ;
I wish as much now to have young men brought up in good
order of living, and in some more severe discipline than now
commonly they b e ; " and on this point the excellent Ascham,
although he brings the greatest authorities of the age to support
him, does not recommend himself as so sensible to modern minds
as he did in the first part of his treatise. " Erasmus, the honor
of learning of all our time, said wisely that experience is the
common schoolhouse of fools and ill men." Ascham thinks that
good precepts of learning " be the eyes of the mind, to look
wisely before a man, which way to go right and which not." To
him life in the world was a simple matter, and the science of
conduct consisted in a few precepts gathered from learning which
would act as a sort of charm and keep the man from evil ways.
" Before entering on the world a man must be diligently instructed
in precepts of well-doing. . . . He hazardeth sore that waxeth
E

50

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. I I .

wise by experience. An unhappy master is he that is made
cunning by many shipwrecks . . . and surely he that would
prove wise by experience, he may be witty in deed; but even
like a swift runner that runneth fast out of his way, and upon
the night, he knoweth not whither. . . . And look well upon the
former life of those few, whether your example be old or young,
who without learning have gathered by long experience a little
wisdom and some happiness : and when you do consider, what,
mischief they have committed, what dangers they have escaped
(and yet twenty for one do perish in the adventure), then think
well with yourself whether ye would that your own son should
come to wisdom and happiness by the way of such experience or
no." Ascham's advice is that fathers, having diligently instructed
their sons in the good precepts of life which can be found in
learning, opinions, and moral maxims, probably of some great
authority of the classic world, should keep them in moral leadingstrings till such time as their age or their circumstances rendered
them unsusceptible to or undesirous of the teaching of experience.
In old times " a young gentleman was never free to go where he.
would, and do what he list himself, but under the kepe and
by the counsell of some grave governor, until he was either
married, or called to bear some office in the Common wealth
And see the great obedience that was used in old times to fathers,
and governors. Even Cyrus the Great, after he had conquered
Babylon and subdued rich King Croesus, would not marry at hisuncle's invitation without asking leave from his father : but
' our time is so far from that old discipline and obedience, as,
now, not only young gentlemen, but even very girls dare without
fear, though not without open shame, where they list and how
they list, marry themselves in spite of fathers, mothers, God,,
good order, and all.7 " The cause of this evil is " that youth i&
least looked into, when they stand most need of good keep and
regard. It availeth not to see them well taught in young years,
and after when they come to lust and youthful days to give
them licence to live as they lust themselves." And on this point
Ascham is eloquent. He bewails the degeneracy of noblemen's
sons. " For wisdom and virtue there be many fair examples in
this court for young gentlemen to follow . . . but young gentlemen are fain commonlie to do in court as young archers do in the
Held, that is take such marks as be nigh them although they be
never so foul to shoot at. I mean, they be driven to keep company with the worst : and what force ill company hath, to corrupt
good wits the wisest men know best." In the youth of to-day,

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK m

EDUCATION.

51

says Ascham, error and phantasy have taken the place of truth
and judgment: innocence and ignorance of ill are called rudeness
and gracelessness. The chief and greatest grace of all, is to dare
to do any mischief, to contemn stoutly any goodness, to be busy
in every matter, to be skilful in everything, to acknowledge no
ignorance at all; to be always in the fashion, no matter what it
be. "And if some Smithfield ruffian take up some strange
going : some new mowing with the mouth : some wrenching with
the shoulder : some brave proverb : some fresh new oath, that is
not stale but will run round in the mouth : some new disguised
garment: a desperate hat, fond in fashion or garish in colour,
whatsoever it cost, how small soever his living be, by what shift
soever it be gotten, gotten must it be and used with the first, or
else the grace of it is stale and gone." And the bad habits and
tendencies of youth are intensified by the practice they have of
travelling into Italy. " I was once in Italy myself : but I thank
God," says Ascham, with great naivete, " m y abode there was
but nine days. . . . Virtue once made that country, mistress
over all the world. Vice now maketh that country slave to
them, that before were glad to serve it. . . . Italy now is not
that Italy it was wont to be : and therefore now not so fit a place,
as some do count it for young men to fetch either wisdom or
honestie from thence." Ascham, in the nine days that he had
spent there, had seen " in that little time, in one city, more
liberty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our noble city of London
in nine years." Italy is like Circe's court : many " being mules
and horses before they went, returned very asses and swine home
again : yet everywhere very foxes with subtle and busy heads :
and where they may, very wolves with cruel, malicious hearts."
" The Italians say : ' Englese Italianeto e un diabolo incarnato,'
that is to say, you remain men in shape and fashion, but become
devils in life and condition. . . . And now choose you, you
Italian-Englishmen, whether you will be angry with us for calling
you devils, or else with your own selves that take so much pains
and go so far to make yourselves both. If some do not well
understand what is an Englishman Italianated I will plainly tell
him. He that by living and travelling in Italy bringeth home
into England out of Italy, the religion, the learning, the policy,
the experience, the manners of Italy. That is to say, for religion,
papistry or worse : for learning, less commonly than they carried
out with them : for policy, a factious heart, a discoursing head,
a mind to meddle in all men's matters : for experience, plenty of
new mischieves never known in England before : for manners,

52

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. ir.

variety of vanieties and change of filthy living. These be the
enchantments of Circe, brought out of Italy to mar men's manners in England." Such was in Ascham's time the current
opinion of the influence of Italy—Italy which only a few years
ago had been the one source of light and culture to Europe,
then struggling under the fetters of the Middle Ages, whose
great men had been to the world prophets of knowledge and
culture. Ascham of course exaggerates : there was much true
culture still in Italy, but it was confined to the few. Italy had
no bond of sympathy in the consciousness of a wide, national
life, and no belief, either patriotic or religious, which could
dignify the smaller city life, and infuse healthiness and a vigour
and a sense of large interests into the existence of its citizens.
It was Circe's court to the pious Englishman, a place where selfindulgence and the absence of all restraints turned human beings
into swine ; and the only remedy against its enchantments, " the
true medicine against the enchantments of Circe, the vanity of
licentious pleasures, the enticements of all sin, is in Homer the
herb Moly, with the black root and white flower, sour at the
first but sweet in the end: termed by Hesiodus the study of
virtue, hard and irksome in the beginning, but in the end easie
and pleasant, . . . and the divine poet Homer saith plainly that
this medicine against sin and vanity is not found out by man,
but given and taught by G6d."
In the second book Ascham is concerned with the ready way
to learn the Latin tongue; and with the comparison of authors,
deciding which are best for the training of youth.
Translation, or double translation, paraphrase, expressing the
meaning in other words, turning a worse expression into a better,
metaphrase, turning verse into prose, or vice versd, epitome or
condensation—a good exercise in itself, but bad if it supersede
the reading itself—imitation, especially of the best authors, and
lastly, declamation,—are all good exercises in the ready way of
learning the Latin tongue. " Translation is most commendable
and most common in schools : especially is double translation to
be recommended, requiring as it does the daily use of writing,
which is the only thing that breedeth deep root both in the art
for good understanding and in the memory for sure keeping of
all that is learned." Ascham is of Bacon's opinion that writing
maketh an exact man. " Paraphrase hath good place in learning,
but not of mine opinion for any scholar, but is only to be left to
a perfect master, either to expound openly a good author withal
or to compare privately for his own exercise, how some notable

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WORK IN EDUCATION.

53

piece of an excellent author may be uttered with other lit words. . .
" Metaphrase, it were not well to use in grammar schools, even
for the self-same causes that be recited against paraphrase . . .
it was Socrates7 exercise and pastime (as Plato reporteth) when
he was in prison to translate Esop's fables into verse. . . . Neither
should epitome have place among young scholars in grammar
schools: but it is an exercise which may bring much profit to
ripe heads and staid judgments: it is good too for those quick
inventors and fair ready speakers, who being boldened with their
present ability to say more and perchance better do, at the sudden
for that present than any other can do, use less help of diligence
and study than they ought to do : and so have in them commonly
less learning and weaker judgment for all deep considerations
than some duller heads and slower tongues have. . . . Imitation is
a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example which ye
go about to follow : the imitation of the best models is perhaps
the best and most natural way to acquire the spirit of a language :
of itself it is large and wide : for all the works of nature in a
manner be examples for art to follow." Then he considers the
models most fit to be followed; "for word and speech Plautus is
more plentiful, and Terence more pure and proper. . . . After
Plautus and Terence no writing remaineth until Tullus' tyme,
except a few short fragments of L. Crassus5 excellent wit . . .
and 4 men only when the Latin tongue was full ripe be left
unto us, who did leave to posterity the fruit of their wit and
learning : Varro, Sallust, Cesar, and Cicero. . . . But Varro's, in
his books on husbandry, is, compared to Tully, but the talk of a
spent old man. Sallust is a wise and worthy writer, but he
requireth a learned reader and a right considerer of him. . . . And
therefore thus justly I may conclude of Cesar, that where in all
others the best that ever wrote, in any time, or in any tongue, in
Greek or Latin, I except neither Plato nor Demosthenes nor
Tully, some fault is justly noted, in Cesar only could never yet
fault be found. . . . A good student must be careful and diligent
to read with judgment over even those authors, which did write
in the most perfect time : and let him not be afraid to try them
both in propriety of words and form of style by the touchstone
of Cesar and Cicero, whose purity was never soiled, no, not by
the sentence of those that loved them worst."
Both the thought and the expression of Ascham and of More
mark them as belonging to the quite early jDeriod of the English
Eenaissance, before the mind had become accustomed to the free
exercise of its intellectual faculties, and familiar with the use of

54

THE SCHOOL OF THE NEW LEARNING.

[CHAP. 11.

language—before it was capable of skilfully adapting words to
thoughts. The thought of both Ascham and More is marked by
strength, earnestness, and simplicity; and these sterling qualities
are communicated to their style by the very force, as it were, of
their single-heartedness, in thinking everything of the matter
and nothing of the form. They are entirely occupied with what
they are going to say : they are filled with ideas which are new
and striking to them, and which they pour out garrulously and
diffusely : they have no conception of the selection and arrangement of thought with a view to bringing out a point: still less
have they the idea of studying the proportion of thoughts and
the harmony of words with a view to style. Only very faintly
can be perceived in their works the beginnings of that self-control
and self-criticism in thought and style which mark the great
thinker and artist. This is one of the last gifts of culture. The
Eenaissance had to give first an impetus to thought by stimulating
interest in the ideas of others, before it could influence in the
direction of study of expression, and could, lastly, encourage that
harmony of thought and expression which makes art. The works
of the New Learning mark the first phase, the works of the
Euphuists and the Courtly Makers the second, and the last includes the productions of the most glorious Elizabethan period,
its poems, its dramas, its beginnings of fine prose writing in the
works of Hooker and Bacon.
There is sometimes a great charm in the prose of Ascham and
of More, and of other writers of this early time, which comes
mainly from the sincerity and reality of their feeling, their intense
preoccupation with their own thought, and their desire to make
others see the same thing in the same light. This earnestness
is, as it were, one of the good qualities connected with their
defects: it comes from their inability to see the other side of
things: it is the strength that some minds possess, because all
their energy flows in one current, and is not diffused by many
interests and many emotions; but they are deficient in sympathy,
making no effort to understand the side to which they are instinctively opposed. Ascham is most impressive in his warning
against Italy, a country which he considers an absolute den of unmitigated sin and shame. And the best prose of the time is found
in Latimer's sermons, especially in the sermon of the Ploughers,
where he inveighs against the sins of his time with all the
earnestness of a preacher who feels that there is only one way to
salvation, and who is sincerely and honestly grieved at the perverseness of his generation. " Oh London, London, repent, repent,

CHAP, ii.]

ITS WOKK IN EDUCATION.

55

for I think God is more displeased with London than ever he
was with the city of Nebo. Repent therefore, repent London,
and remember that the same God liveth now that punished ISTebo,
even the same God and none other, and He will punish sin as
well now as he did then, and He will punish the iniquity of
London as well as he did then of JSTebo. . . . And now I would
ask a strange question. Who is the most diligent bishop and
prelate in all England that passeth all the rest in doing his office ?
I can tell, for I know him. Who it is I know him well. But
now 1 see you listing and hearkening, that I should name him.
There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent
prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it
is ? I will tell you. It is the Devil. He is the most diligent
preacher of all other : he is never out of his dioceses, he is never
from his cure : ye shall never find him unoccupied, he is ever in
his parish, he keepeth residence at all times : ye shall never find
him out of the way. Call for him when you will, he is ever at
home, the diligentest preacher in all the realm, he is ever at
his plough, no cording nor lockinge can hinder him, he is ever
applying his business : ye shall never find him idle, I warrant
you. And his office is to hinder religion, to maintain superstition,
to set up idolatry, to teach all kind of popetrie : he is as ready,
as can be wished, for to set forth his plough, to devise as many
ways as can be to deface and obscure God's glory."
Of this sort of eloquence that comes straight from enthusiasm,
earnestness, and sincerity of feeling, there was no lack in those
times. The English mind wanted but the widening of thought
and feeling, the development of the imagination, the cultivation
of sensibility to beauty, whether external or internal, which comes
with wider life and wider culture. Its readiness to learn and
imitate the example of Italy, the stimulus of a great and exciting
national life, served to mature and develop it, till it found its fit
expression in the production and enjoyment of that art which
marks the great Elizabethan period as the one in which English
vitality was at its best and highest.

CHAPTER I I I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

PART I.—Poetry.—The Company of Courtly Makers.
WYATT, Thomas, b. 1503, d. 1542 ; HOWARD, Henry, Earl of Surrey,
prob. b. 1517, d. 1547 ; GASCOIGNE, George, b. 1536, d. 1577;
SACKVILLE, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, b. 1536, d. 1608 ; SIDNEY,
Sir Philip, b. 1544, d. 1586; "WATSON, Thomas, b. about 1557,
d. 1625 ; CONSTABLE, Henry, b. prob. 1555, d. before 1616.
M. TAINE says that the " Renaissance in England was the Renaissance of the Saxon genius;" that what made the glory of the
Elizabethan period was the union in its greatest men of the
Teutonic earnestness and depth of thought,—of Teutonic and
Saxon sensibilities with the Italian and foreign susceptibility to
external beauty, to beauty of form, whether physical or literary.
The reader of English literature before the Renaissance may
notice how absent from the Teutonic genius was this capacity for
form, this appreciation of external beauty, and the gift of artistic
expression. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, who had what Taine calls
a very vivid and strong inward representation of the external world,
had little facility in expression. Their songs and war-poems are
a succession of cries and visions,—no attention is paid even to
the sequence of idea and thought; and when we come to later
productions of less genius, when the old warlike life, the stimulus
to their finest and most heroic emotions, had passed away, and
those who wrote were prompted by the crude impulses of an
undeveloped national life, we have shapeless poems like Langland's
Piers Ploivman, impressive and sometimes beautiful by mere force
of earnestness, but clumsy with their weight of solid purpose;
or we have dull productions like Cower's Confessio Amantis, where
the excellent Teuton, full of moral purpose, treads his French
measure with elephantine step. Then at last we have Chaucer,
who, as Mr. Lowell says, "shows the first result of the Roman

CHAP, in.]

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

57

yeast on the home-baked Saxon loaf." Chaucer, in his last and
English period, gave a prophecy of what English literature might
be. In the first periods of his life he had devoted himself to
French and Italian models; but, like the great artist he was, he
had assimilated their excellence, and, not allowing them to assimilate him or deprive him of his originality, he at last fell back on
his own instincts, and produced works which give him a claim to
be called " our first national artist." He did indeed
" Prelude those melodious bursts which fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."
But Chaucer was much in advance of his age, and before the
national mind could enter into possession of that promised land
which his genius had reached, it was necessary that it should
attain to that appreciation of external form, to that capacity and
facility of expression, which is naturally so foreign to the Teutonic
genius; that it should undergo some training in this direction;
that special encouragement should be given to attention to
externals. For a time exaggerated stress must be laid on
grace and charm and facility of expression, before English art,
whose foundation must of course be the instincts of the English
genius, could flourish. And fortunately the stimulus of the
Eenaissance, with its revival of the classics, with its Italian
literary fashions, produced a movement which immediately preceded that of the most glorious age of Elizabethan art, and was
to a certain extent its cause. " The Company of Courtly Makers "
in the sphere of poetry, the Euphuists in the sphere of prose,
represent the school of discipline and training; their primary
objects being the imitation of classic and Italian fashion, the
study of externals, the worship of form.
" In the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign," says Puttenham
in his Arte of English Poesie, " there sprung up a new Company
of Courtly Makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and
Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having
travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately
measures and style of the Italian poesie as novices newly crept
out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly
polished our new and homely manner of vulgar poesie from that
it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the
first reformers of our English metre and style."
To the " Company of Courtly Makers " may be said to belong
Surrey, Wyatt, Vaux, G-rimald, Gascoigne, Sackville, and Sidney;

58

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

all writers, whose work, marked by more or less genius, is characterised by studious attention to form, and by thoughts and
emotions which are more or less artificial. Sir Philip Sidney
stands out from among these men partly because by him the
lesson seems better learnt,—it leaves as results capabilities of
expression which appear almost as instincts; partly because the
larger personality of this " noble and matchless gentleman" is
felt in the greater reality and truth of the emotions and the
thoughts he expresses. Surrey and Wyatt, the founders of this
school, are perhaps its most typical writers. As Mr. Churton
Collins says, they have all the spirit of the Early Renaissance,
" its classicism, its harmony, its appreciation of form . . . they
gave the deathblow to that rudeness, that grotesqueness, that
prolixity, that difTuseness, that pedantry, which had deformed
with fatal persistency the poetry of mediaevalism; and while they
purified our language from the gallicisms of Chaucer and his
followers, they fixed the permanent standard of our versification.
To them we are indebted for the great reform which substituted
a metrical for a rhythmical structure." Their writings, and indeed
the writings of all those belonging to the same school, are animated
by that chivalry of the early Elizabethan times, so ideal and so
pure in the grasp of the best minds, so artificial in the grasp
of the lower. This chivalry was only another development, purer
and intenser, of that mediaeval chivalry which animated the
troubadours and trouveres ; of that chivalry which, regarding the
two ideas—honour, and devotion to women—as the inspiration of
what is best and highest in life, almost took the place of religion,
becoming a strong power over conduct. The worship of love is
compared in a Norman fabliau to the worship of God :—
" Et pour verite vous record
Dieu et Amour sont d'un accord
Dieu aime sens et honorance
Amour ne l'a pas en viltance
Dieu hait orgueil et faussete
Et Amour aime loyaute
Dieu aime honneur et courtoisie
Et bonne amour ne hait-il mie ;
Dieu ecoute belle priere
Amour ne la met pas en arriere."

And Chaucer makes Troilus say :—
" Thanked be ye, Lord, for that I love,
This is the right life that I am in,
To flemin all manner vice and sin,
This doeth me so to virtue for to entende
That day by day I in my will amende."

CHAP. III.]

POETRY.

59

Of course these ideas in the grasp of weaker minds, and when
they became a fashion, lost their force and their beauty, and
developed into the exaggerated and insipid songs of the later
troubadours and trouveres. They gave rise to weary poems like
The Romance of the Rose, and became actually ridiculous in the
hands of English writers, who were eager to follow a fashion
which was so entirely foreign to their nature. The chivalry of
Gower is but grotesque and tedious servility:—
" W h a t thing she bid me do, I do,
And when she bid me go, I go,
And when her list to clepe, I come.
I serve, I bow, I look, I lout,
Mine eye followeth her about;
What so she will, so will I,
When she will sit I knele by,
When she will stand then will I stand ; "

and so on throughout whole page.
And even the larger and more spiritualised chivalry of the
Italian Renaissance does not always sit easily on " the Courtly
Makers." In TotteVs Miscellany, published in 1557, a collection
of the sonnets and love-songs of writers in this school, there
are many poems, some even by Wyatt and Surrey, which are
purely conventional and empty and artificial. We hear so
much of "raging love," of scalding and smoking sighs, of
vapoured eyes;—these poets with their love-sick poems make
us feel how utterly grotesque and ridiculous a thing is chivalry
if its spirit is forgotten. For the spirit of chivalry being so
delicate and ideal, its sublimity can easily become foolishness of
the most aggravated kind. The ideas of chivalry have had the
fate of melodies which, " once set afloat in the world, are taken
up by all sorts of instruments, some of them wofully coarse,
feeble, and out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out
that the melody itself is detestable." Many of the Company of
Courtly Makers, however, were preserved from excessive artificiality and consequent grotesqueness by their personal admiration and close imitation of Petrarch's spirit and works. In
Petrarch's great and pure personality we have a good example
of the spirit of chivalry at its best. The inspirer of Petrarch's
life and poems was Laura, daughter of Hudibert of Noves, and
wife of Hugues de Saxe, both of Avignon. Petrarch first saw
her on the 6th April 1327, and she died of the plague on the

60

THE BEGINNINGS OE ART.

[CHAP. H I .

6th April 1348. For her he had that religious and enthusiastic
passion "such as mystics imagine they feel for the deity, and
such as Plato supposes to be the bond of union between elevated
minds."
In more than 300 sonnets Petrarch celebrates all the little
circumstances of his attachment, and records "those precious
favours which," as Sismondi says, "after an acquaintance of
fifteen or twenty years, consisted at most of a kind word, a
glance not altogether severe, a momentary expression of regret
and tenderness at his departure, or a deeper paleness at the idea
of leaving his beloved and constant friend." He has written four
sonnets on the emotions he experienced on picking up her glove;
and in tracing all the minutest details of this distant attachment, in employing his imagination to describe all the emotions
that he felt, that he was feeling, or that he might have felt,
even he becomes at times wearisome and conventional. But
occasional artificiality and convention can be pardoned to one
who gave a stimulus to all that was best in chivalry, to all that
was so powerful in refining human life and emotion. His works
embody that spirit so well understood by a modern writer :—
" It is my fate : your soul hath conquered mine,
And I must be your slave and glory in
The bondage, whether cruel or benign.
Still let me cherish hopes even here to win,
By strenuous toil, the far-off Prize divine ;
And feed on visions, not so shadowy thin,
Of gaining you beneath a nobler sun
Should I in this life's battle be undone.
" And with my passionate love for evermore
Is blended pure and reverent gratitude,
Nor can I this full sacrifice deplore,
Though you should scorn me, whom you have subdued,
Or know not what devotion I outpour.
Ah ! from this timeless night what boundless good
Your presence hath bestowed on me ! no less
That I am stung with my unworthiness.
" Henceforth my life shall not unearnest prove ;
It hath an ardent aim, a glorious goal:
Numb faith relives : you from your sphere above
Have planted and must nourish in my soul
That priceless blessing, pure and fervent love,
O'er which no thought of self can have control.
If with these boons come ever longing pain,
It shall be welcomed for the infinite gain."

CHAP. III.]

POETRY.

61

The form which Petrarch and his followers chose for the
expression of these emotions was the sonnet. The lyric poet,
the poet who expresses transitory moods and emotions, is affected,
says Sismondi, not inspired. "Poetry addressed to others, of
which the object is persuasion, should borrow its ornaments from
eloquence, but when it is an effusion of the heart, an overflow of
sentiment is its embellishment and harmony." The intensity
and harmony of verse obedient to certain rules which make what
we call the sonnet, was the form invented by the poet for the
expression of the moods of ideal and chivalric love, a form
borrowed originally from the Sicilians, but which the chivalrous
poets of Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and his followers, first made
popular. The ideal sonnet is composed of two quatrains which
introduce the subject, exciting an expectation which is fulfilled
by the two tercets, which move more rapidly; the lines increasing
in intensity up to the thirteenth and fourteenth lines, which
sometimes are almost epigrammatic in their condensation of feeling and thought. In the first eight lines there are only two
rhymes, with their order fixed for the first quatrain, where it is
a b b a , but not for the second. In the last six lines there are
three rhymes, which the poet can arrange as he likes. "The
sonnet," says Sismondi, "is essentially musical, and essentially
founded on the harmony of sound, from which its name is
derived. It acts upon the mind rather through the words than
through the thoughts. The richness and fulness of the rhymes
(the sonnet has generally four and never more than five rhymes)
constitute a portion of its grace. The return of the same sounds
makes a powerful impression in proportion to their repetition
and completeness; and we are astonished when we thus find ourselves affected almost without the power of being able to
ascertain the cause of our emotion." The limited emotions of
the chivalric sonnet prevented it from reaching that pitch of
excellence which it did afterwards in the hands of Daniel and of
Shakspere, who, living in freer and more emancipated times, cast
off conventions of emotions and thought, and made the sonnet
breathe real passion and true thought.
I t was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who first naturalised
the sonnet in England. He never indeed wrote perfect sonnets,
regarded from the point of view of that mechanism from which
Petrarch hardly ever departed, for he did not observe the rules
with regard to rhyme; but his little poems of fourteen lines are
the sincere expressions of his emotional, though essentially
chivalrous and therefore artificial nature: his verses are not

62

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. HI.

mere imitations and translations of Petrarch's sonnets, as were
those of the elder and more accurate poet, Wyatt: he made the
sonnet in England a real living form of art. Born probably in
1517, he passed a life which united the habits of scholar and
courtier, but the incidents of which are obscure. He was
beheaded on Tower Hill, January 21, 1547, nominally on the
charge of high treason, really because he was the victim of a
Court intrigue. In addition to being capable of " that poetic
elaboration which the sonnet required,"—in addition to possessing
very markedly that capacity for self-criticism which, as Taine says,
marks the attainment of real culture,—Surrey possessed to a
high degree the poetic temperament, a lively and vivid imagination, a great sensibility to beauty of all kinds, moral, physical,
and natural. Not only did he make many changes in the
mechanism and style of verse, introducing the pastoral by his
" Complaint of a Dying Lover," the first poem of this sort in the
English language,—not only did he first introduce blank verse,
by his translation of two books of the JEneid into ten-syllabled
lines of metre without rhyme,—but he infused these forms with
real spirit. His sonnets to Geraldine, though generally, owing
to the limited emotions with which they deal, artificial and conventional, are on the whole the genuine and sometimes beautiful expressions of the poet's feelings. There is true pathos
and feeling in "The Complaint by Night of the Lover not
beloved " :—
" Alas ! so all things now do hold their peace!
Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing,
The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease ;
The nightes car the stars about do bring;
Calm is the sea : the waves work less and less :
So am not I, whom love, alas ! doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great increase
Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing
In joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease,
For my sweet thoughts do sometimes pleasure bring :
But by and by the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting.
"When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain."
And the sonnet in which he " vows to love faithfully, howsoever
he be rewarded," is animated by the best spirit of the Renaissance
chivalry, though the expression and form are less perfect:—
" Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green,
Or where his beams do not dissolve the ice :

CHAP. III.]

POETRY.

63

In temperate heat where he is felt and seen :
In presence prest of people mad or wise.
Set me in high, or yet in low degree,
In longest night or in the shortest day :
In clearest sky or where clouds thickest be,
In lusty youth or when my hairs are grey.
Set me in heaven, in earth, or else in hell,
In hill or dale, or in the foaming flood.
Small or at large, alive where so I dwell:
Sick or in health : in evil fame or good.
Hers will I be, and only with this thought
Content myself, although my chance be nought."

There is spirit and fire in the little poem " I n Praise of his Love,"
a subject so hackneyed, so used up, by many of the contributors
to TotteVs Miscellany, who are for ever praising their mistresses,
and insisting that though Petrarch was never surpassed, yet that
Laura is again and again surpassed. " He reproveth them that
compare their ladies with his."
"Give place, ye lovers, here before,
That spent your boasts and brags in vain ;
My lady's beauty passeth more
The best of yours I dare well sayen
Than doth the sun the candle bright,
Or brightest day the darkest night."

It is to Surrey's credit that he recognised the full worth of his
contemporary Wyatt, who, although inferior to him as a poet
of chivalry, recommends himself to the modern mind by the
earnestness and sincerity of his nature, which, tinged with
gloom, perhaps rendered him unfit to follow chivalric fashions.
His best poems dwell on the more impersonal and deeper sides
of the conventional emotion : they are animated by that broader
and deeper spirit which is anxious to get outside its little world
of personal hopes and fears,—a spirit which is seen at a depressingheight in the later philosophic poems of Sir John Davies and
Lord Brooke.
Surrey's poem on " The Death of Sir Thomas Wyatt" praises
the poet in the ordinary conventional terms : " A man of visage
stern and mild : where both did grow, Vice to contemn, and Virtue
to rejoice : . . . an eye whose judgment none affect could blind
. . . whose piercing look did represent a mind, with Virtue fraught,
reposed void of guile." We gather, both from Surrey's poem and
from the facts of Wyatt's life, that he possessed the vigorous
Elizabethan versatility. " H e was a courtier, a poet, a diplomatist,
a statesman, a scholar of great linguistic attainments, an athlete

64

THE BEGINNINGS OF AET.

[CHAP. H I .

delighting in his strength and skill. Born in 1503, he soon became a conspicuous figure owing to his wit, his fascinating
manners, and his handsome person. . . H e was less original t h a n
Surrey in t h a t much of w h a t he wrote was rather direct translation
or close imitation : he copied his sonnets from Petrarch, his lyrics
from the Italian, a n d also from Spanish a n d French sources.
W i t h the exception of about half-a-dozen of his poems, all are
modelled on writings in those languages."
Nevertheless W y a t t , regardless of convention, infuses his
own sad, earnest, dignified spirit into some of his productions.
The poem in which " t h e lover beseecheth his mistress not to
forget his steclfast faith a n d true intent," is full of grave,
true feeling, a n d has none of t h e artificiality t h a t h u n g about
most of " the Courtly Makers " :—
" Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a truth as I have meant,
My great travail so gladly spent
Forget not yet.
" Forget not yet when first began
The weary life ye know, since when
The suit, the service none can tell,'
Forget not yet.
" Forget not yet the great assays,
The cruel wrong, the scornful ways,
The painful patience on delays,
Forget not yet.
" Forget not, oh ! forget not this,
How long ago hath been and is,
The mind that never meant amiss
Forget not yet.
"Forget not then thine own approved,
The which so long hath thee so loved,
Whose steadfast faith yet never moved.
Forget not yet."
Considering t h e conventions of t h e time which looked upon
a wrong done as one of t h e best motives for poetic fury and
passion, there is genuine m a g n a n i m i t y in t h e poem in which the
" F o r s a k e n lover consoleth himself with remembrance of past
happiness " :—
" Spite hath no power to make me sad,
Nor scornfulness to make me plain :

CHAP, in.]

POETRY.

65

It doth suffice that once I had,
And so to leave it is no pain.
Let them frown on that least doth gain,
Who did rejoice must needs be glad ;
And though with words thou ween'st to reign,
It doth suffice that once I had.
Since that in checks thus overthwart,
And coyly looks thou dost delight:
It doth suffice that mine thou wert,
Though change hath put thy faith to flight.
Alas ! it is a peevish spite,
To yield thyself and then to part;
But since thou force thy faith so light,
It doth suffice that mine thou wert.
And since thy love doth thus decline,
And in thy heart such hate doth grow ;
It doth suffice that thou wert mine,
And with good will I quite it so.
Sometime my friend, farewell my foe,
Since thou change I am not thine ;
But for relief of all my woe,
It doth suffice that thou wert mine.
Praying you all that hear this song,
To judge no wight, nor none to blame ;
It doth suffice she doth me wrong,
And that herself doth know the same.
And though she change it is no shame,
Their kind it is, and hath been long :
Yet I protest she hath no name ;
It doth suffice she doth me wrong."

In TottePs Miscellany we have also poems which, in a
moralising tone, treat of interests of human life other than the
fashionable ones of love and chivalric worship. Their existence
points to a time soon coming when the conventions of the Early
Eenaissance would be shaken off, and thought and feeling would
become unshackled, and range round the world, becoming wider
and deeper. Surrey himself translated from Martial a poem,
advising " t h e means to attain a happy life," through " t h e
quiet mind, the equal friend, . . . true wisdom joined with simpleness." Various minor poets wrote on " the mutabilitie of this
life," on the " transitoriness of beauty." Grimald wrote poems
" on laws," " on friendship," a " description of virtue," a poem
in "praise of measure-keeping." Vaux having given in to the
prevailing fashion so much as to write a poem on " the assault
of Cupid upon the city where the lover's heart lay wounded, and
how he was taken," experiences a reaction in the poem where
" the aged lover renounceth love."

66

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

" I loathe that I did love
In youth that I thought sweet.
And ye that bide behind,
Have ye none other trust:
As ye of clay were cast by kind,
So shall we waste to dust."

Poets begin to give symptoms, marked in some cases by genius,
that the trammels put upon sentiment by the Courtly Makers are
becoming wearisome. But that real genius—deep, refined, delicate, and powerful thought—could find expression within the
sphere of the Courtly Makers is proved by the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella.
In Sir Philip Sidney's poems are found the true essence of
Kenaissance chivalry, expressed with the thoughtfulness and
animated by that delicate ideal feeling which specially distinguished his personality. Some of Sidney's sonnets are indeed
barren and over-elaborate, for he belonged to the school known
as the " Areopagus." Gabriel Harvey, a critic and scholar, who
must have had real merit, or he would not have made and preserved the friendship of so many of the celebrated men of his
time, though he is only known to us now by his absurd classical
conventions and the virulence of his literary quarrels, was the
centre of a group of poets who made poetic form their object,
trying to bring in a reform which should make English verse
entirely obedient and subservient to classical rules. Spenser,
who lived much longer than Sidney, quite emancipated himself
both in theory and practice from this inartistic and unpatriotic
idea. Later he turned the system into ridicule, saying that it
had been the cause of the production of many " passing singular
odd poems;" but Sidney never in theory threw of! the conventions and theories of his youth, though often in practice the
sincerity of his feeling caused him to triumph over the stiffness,
and artificiality naturally engendered by too much attention to
form.
" Fool, said my muse to me,
Look in thine heart and write."

And love, says Sidney in another sonnet, " doth hold my hand
and make me write." Of the sincerity of his inspiration there
can be no doubt. It was the outcome of his feeling for Penelope
Devereux, daughter of the first Earl of Essex,—a feeling which
was probably quite genuine and unaffected at first, but which
afterwards he evidently cultivated as a poetic motive. He met

CHAP. III.]

POETEY.

67

her first in 1575, next in 1580, when she was either married or
pledged to Lord Rich. Sidney's sonnets, like Shakspere's, have
an autobiographical interest. They can be divided into three
distinct stages. First, there is the period of deep idealising
passion, when he glorifies Stella and expresses scorn of his rival,
Lord Rich. Sonnet V. is very characteristic of Sidney in its
mixture of chivalry and Puritanism, in its admiration both for
physical and for moral beauty :—
" It is most true that eyes are form'd to serve
The inward light, and that the heavenly part
Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve
Rebels to nature, strive for their ow-n smart.
It is most true what we call Cupid's dart
An image is, which for ourselves we carve
And, fools, adore in temple of our heart
Till that good God make church and churchmen starve :
True, that the beauty virtue is indeed
Whereof this beauty can be but a shade,
"Which elements with mortal mixture breed :
True that on earth we are but pilgrims made,
And should in soul up to our country move :
True and yet true—that I must Stella love."

Sonnet XXXI. opens with two lines that are quite perfect in
themselves, and give at the same time the spirit of the following
sonnet, which is one of the saddest and yet one of the most
beautiful of the whole series :—
" With how sad steps, 0 moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face !
Then even of fellowship, 0 moon, tell me
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit ?"

The second division includes those sonnets which are animated
by a more hopeful spirit. Stella has apparently relented to
a certain extent.
" 0 joy too high for my low style to show,
0 bliss fit for a nobler state than mine.
Gone is the winter of my misery,
My spring appears : 0 see what here doth grow !
For Stella hath with words where faith doth shine
Of her high heart given me the monarchy."

And the third division of the sonnets includes those in which he

68

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. HI.

claims freedom from love, drawn away from Stella " by a great
cause which needs both use and art."
" Sweet, for a while give respite to my heart.
0 let not fools in me thy works reprove,
And scorning say, see what it is to love."

Thus Sidney's last sonnets breathe that freer spirit which was
to throw off the conventions of chivalry and produce the vivid
glowing poetry of Marlowe and Shakspere and their contemporaries ; and in his lyrics we could almost place him with these
greatest Elizabethans, so free and spirited and emancipated does
he show himself. The song to Stella in her absence, beginning
1

' 0 dear life, when shall it "be
That mine eyes thine eyes shall see ? "

the dirge beginning
*' Ring out your bells, let mourning shows he spread,
For Love is dead,"
show that he stood on the very threshold of the new life and of
that art which was its free expression.
Thoroughly artificial but yet charming was the poet Watson.
He is an "ingenious and posthumous child of the Courts of
Love," with his " Passionate Centurie of Love," and " The Tears
of Fancy or Love disdained."
The poet Constable stands between the artificial school and
the fresh native school that was springing up. " His things," says
Mr. Lang, " have at once the freshness of a young and the trivial
grace of a decadent literature." He can introduce real freshness
into a pastoral song, as in that between Phillis and Amaryllis; he
can put vigour into the well-worn classical tale of Venus and
Adonis.
George Gascoigne and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst,
must also be mentioned as pioneers far more distinguished than
Constable, though less distinguished than Sidney. As Mr.
Church says, " The scanty remains of Sackville's poetry are
chiefly interesting because they show a strong sense of the defects
of the existing poetical standards and a craving after something
better." Sackville, who is celebrated as having taken part in
the authorship of the Tragedy of Gorboduc, is renowned also as
having planned a great work called The Mirror for Magistrates,
containing a series of poetical examples showing how " grievous
plagues, vices, are punished in great princes and magistrates, and

CHAP. III.]

POETRY.

69

how frail and unstable worldly prosperity is found where fortune
seemeth most highly to favor." His efforts after moral purpose
are not less evident than his struggle after form : he had
evidently theories of poetic fitness and grace, to which he had
not talent enough to be true in practice. But he has a certain
grandeur and largeness of style which he must have gained from
the careful and appreciative study of the master at whose feet
he sat—Dante. In the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates,
which, with the story of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham,
was his contribution to this moral poem, there is observable
an attempt to be grand and severe in expression and in the
choice of ornament, which, sometimes failing, gives an impression
of rigidity and stiffness to the verse, but which at other times is
successful and recalls the dignified intensity of Dante's verse.
Sorrows guide the poet to the realms of the dead :—
" I shall thee guide first to the grisly lake,
And thence unto the blissful place of rest,
"Where thou shalt see and hear the plaint they make
That whilom here bare sway among the best :
This shalt thou see : but great is the unrest
That thou must bide, before thou canst attain
Unto the dreadful place where these remain.
Thence come we to the horror and the hell,
The large great kingdoms and the dreadful reign
Of Pinto on his throne where he did dwell,
The wide waste places and the hugy plain,
The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain,
The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan :
Earth, air, and all resounding plaint and moan."

George Gascoigne is spoken of by Webbe as " a witty gentleman, and the very chief of our late rhymers." He was exceedingly popular in his day, being one who recommended himself
by his personal attractions and accomplishments to his contemporaries. Posterity, in doing him justice, must take into account
the facts on which Nash grounded his opinion. " Whoever my
private opinion condemns as faulty, Master Gascoigne is not to
be abridged of his deserved esteem who first beat the path to
that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his
departure : whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with
the English, as Tully did Grseca cum Latinis." He wrote, in
common with the minor poets of his age, poems on the " Arraignment of a Lover," on the " Strange Passion of a Lover;" but in
his " Steel Glass" he attempted a work of a more serious and

70

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

unconventional character, which he meant to be a satire on the
vices and follies of his age, " to hold the mirror up to nature as
deformed by society." It is in blank verse, and is " t h e first
example in our language," says Prof. Morley, "of a poem of any
length and not dramatic, written in that measure." It is an
effective didactic satire animated by a sincere and religious
earnestness.
But the poet was yet to come who could combine spiritual
greatness and earnestness with feeling for the varied beauty and
interest of the world.

PART II.—Prose.—Euphuism and beginnings of Art Criticism.
LYLY, John, b. 1554, d. 1606.—Euphues: First part published, 1579;
Second, 1680.
SIDNEY'S Arcadia: Begun, 1580 ; published, 1590. Apologie for Poetrie :
Written about 1581 (first known edition that of 1595). Life : Son of
Henry Sidney, President of Wales and Lord Deputy of Ireland under
Elizabeth, and Lady Mary Dudley, daughter of Duke of Northumberland, sister of Earl of Leicester; entered Shrewsbury School, 1564 ;
went to Christchurch, Oxford, 1568 ; abroad from May 1572 to May
1575 ; 1575, appears at Elizabeth's Court, takes part in Kenilworth
progress ; 1577, ambassador to Rudolf II. at Prague ; makes acquaintance with Harvey and Spenser, 1578 ; retires to Penshurst till 1580 ;
returns to Court, 1580 ; knighted, 1581 ; 1583, Member of Parliament
for second time ; 1584, appointed Governor of Flushing ; 1586, fatally
wounded at battle of Zutphen.
WEBBE, William.—Discourse of English Poesie: Published, 1586. The
Art of English Poesie, in three books (the first of Poets and Poesie,
the second of Proportion, and the third of Ornament): Published, 1589.
GOSSON, Stephen.—The School of Abuse, 1579.

Euphuism and the Euphuists have for the most part been
cruelly underrated by a posterity who have only noticed the
more trivial, external, and degenerate aspect of this system and
its followers. However far removed many of the Euphuists may
have been from the ideal of their system,—however affected and
insipid and often ridiculous some of them may have become,—it
can never be doubted but that the spirit of Euphuism was sound,
and that the influence it exercised by way of refinement and
polish, both of thought and of style, was great and beneficial.
Euphuism, as it is now generally known in its later and more
degenerate aspect, was little more than the popularisation, and
therefore vulgarisation, of the ideal of Elizabeth's Court,—an ideal
which in itself was high and worthy of respect. At a time when

CHAP. III.]

PROSE.

71

the nation was passing through great and important crises, both
externally and internally, much importance and responsibility
attached itself to the central government. This central government was represented by Elizabeth, whose eccentricities and
vanities and irresolution were obscured to her Court by the ideal
halo that chivalry led them to cast over her as a woman, and their
patriotism as the representative of their country. A high idea of
the duties of a sovereign and her court were engendered in this
enthusiastic time, which coloured with its fervid imagination the
prominent and responsible position occupied by this last of the
Tudor sovereigns, who certainly, more than any of her predecessors,
exerted her almost despotic power with reference to the good of
her people and to the independence and dignity of England. A
high standard of disinterestedness, of enthusiasm and devotion to
public and impersonal duties was set u p ; the Court felt its
responsibility and dignity as the leaders and inspirers of the
nation. "Nobility of blood," says Mr. Church, "was thought
much of; but there was also a nobility of mind to which every
one could aspire, devotion to heroic and unselfish ends, to truth
in thought and action, to that dignity and self-control that
come from fidelity to high and unselfish aims. And in addition
the courtier must be polished and refined in expression; he
must be a scholar and a man of culture; he must have his
imagination abundantly developed, or he could not do his duty in
the sphere of practical life. He must be capable of devoted
admiration for beauty; his words and his actions must ever be the
fit expressions of that chivalry which is inspired by beauty, and
wThich worships beauty in every form, whether physical or moral."
Such an ideal was not merely imaginary : it found fit expression in the personality of Sir Philip Sidney. Even in his youth
Sidney was famous for that " lovely and familiar gravity " which
gave him reverence above his years. He was born of noble and
celebrated parents. He had nobility of blood, and all the education, cultivation, and experience that, far more than rank, was
necessary to make the Elizabethan " gentleman." He went to
school at Shrewsbury, to college at Oxford; he travelled after
the groundworks of his education were completed to France,
Germany, Italy, spending eight months in the country which
was then considered the centre of learning and refinement. He
was introduced at Court on his return in 1575 by his uncle, the
Earl of Leicester, and, meeting "Stella," probably about this
time wrote the sonnets addressed to her. For the next four or five
years, during both his sojourn there, and during his embassy

72

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

to Rudolf, Emperor of Germany, he plunged into fashionable
literature by the publication of the Arcadia, into controversies
on art by his publication of the Apologie for Poetrie. A friend
of Spenser and of Gabriel Harvey, a member of the " Areopagus,"
a member of Parliament, an ally of Drake's in his plans for
aggressive attacks on Spain through her colonies in America, and,
lastly, Governor of Flushing,—Sidney was the ideal of his age
in the active many-sided career that he led, uniting the excellencies of the man of literature and the man of the world.
The story of his passing on the cup to the dying soldier after the
battle of Zutphen, when he himself lay mortally wounded, is
but one incident in a life which was throughout animated by a
high and unselfish spirit. He was adored by his contemporaries
and by immediate posterity. Sir Robert Naunton, in his " Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on the late Queen Elizabeth, her
times and favorites," says: " They have a very quaint and factious
figment of him : that Mars and Mercury fell at variance whose
servant he should be : and there is an epigrammist that saith :
that Art and Nature had spent their excellencies in his fashioning,
and fearing that they should not end what they begun, they
bestowed him on Fortune, and Nature stood musing and amazed
to behold her own work. But these are the petulancies of poets."
"Certain it is," Naunton goes on to say, " h e was a noble and
matchless gentleman;" and without doubt he was matchless in
that no one realised so well the ideas that underlie the best spirit
of Euphuism, especially that spiritual side so obscured by later
Euphuists. He but describes himself in describing David in the
Apologie for Poetrie as " a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind
only cleared by faith." Later, and in proportion as its ideas
become more fashionable and popular, its spirit seemed entirely
to vanish, and its shell only was left. It is this shell of quaint
conceits and frigid thoughts, of sententious and rather commonplace morality, " a quaint mimicry of high sentiment," expressed
in elaborate language, that is generally and exclusively known as
Euphuism. And even if it had never been anything more than
this, the attention it demanded to form and style would alone
have been excellent discipline for the English mind, naturally
careless of elaboration and literary externals. As it was, however, it carried with it the suggestion of something still better
and higher, which was realised by the best minds that grasped
it. Mr. Charles Kingsley, who understands so well the spirit of
Euphuism, and has made us feel even its minor charms in the

CHAP. III.]

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73

person of Frank Leigh of Westward Ho, tells us " to open our
eyes and see in these old Elizabethan gallants our own ancestors,
showing forth, with the luxuriant wildness of youth, all the
virtues which still go to the making of an Englishman. Let us
not only see in their commercial and military daring, in their
political astuteness, in their deep reverence for law, and in their
solemn sense of the great calling of the English nation, the
antitypes or rather the examples of our own; but let us confess
that this chivalry is only another garb of that beautiful tenderness and mercy which is now, as it was then, the twin sister of
English valour; and even in their often extravagant fondness
for continental manners and literature, let us recognise that old
Anglo-Norman teachableness and wide-heartedness which has
enabled us to profit by the wisdom and civilisation of all ages
and all lands, without prejudice to our own distinctive national
character."
The very exaltation and refinement of the Euphuistic ideal
rendered it easily capable of becoming degenerate and ridiculous.
Euphuism at its best was a system of chivalry which could only
be maintained by the cultivation of a high and delicate imagination ; in the grasp of coarser and more ordinary minds it became
merely a seeking after out-of-the-way thoughts, after conceits,
after a certain affected refinement expressed in the most ornate
and elaborate way.
Unfortunately even Sir Philip Sidney
allowed his talents to be employed in catering to the demands
and tastes of a fashionable and Euphuistic world, which had
lowered the spirit and expression of true Euphuism to suit its
own comprehension and tastes.
The Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney is a type of the fashionable novel of the day. It is a long pastoral romance in prose
mixed with verse according to the Italian fashion, adding to the
pastoral a new heroic element, consisting of diffuse accounts of
the adventures of knights and ladies, attached to a very loose
thread of plot: it describes at length their beauty, their valour,
and their moral and mental excellencies. I t differs from the
romances of an earlier and less civilised chivalry only in the
polish and elaboration of the language, and in the occasional gleams
of thoughtfulness which reveal for a moment the personality of
the author. The heroes of the novel, Musidorus and Pyrocles,
being wrecked, find their way to Arcadia. " This country among
all the provinces of Greece hath ever been had in singular reputation, partly for the sweetness of the air and other natural
benefits, but principally for the well-tempered minds of the

74

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

people, who (finding that the shining title of glory so much
affected by other nations doth indeed help little to the happiness
of life) are the only people, which as by their justice and providence give neither cause or hope to their neighbours to annoy
them, so are they not stirred with false praise to trouble other's
quiet, thinking it a small reward for the wasting of their own
lives in ravenyng that their posterity should long after say they
had done so." This country is governed by a king who has
broken up his court, and with his wife and daughters lives in
strict seclusion.
" Here dwelleth and reigneth a prince by name Basileus, a
prince of sufficient skill to govern so quiet a country, where the
good minds of the former princes had set down good laws, and
the well-bringing up of the people doth serve as a most sure
bond to hold them. But to be plain with you, he excels in
nothing so much as the zealous love of his people, wherein he
doth not only pass all his own fore-goers, but as I think all the
princes living. Whereof the cause is that though he exceed not
in the virtues which get admiration : as depth of wisdom, height
of courage, and largeness of magnificence, yet is he notable in
those which stir affection, as truth of word, meekness, courtesy,
mercifulness, and liberality."
His two daughters " are beyond all measure excellent in all
the gifts allotted to reasonable creatures, that we may think they
were born to show that nature is no stepmother to her sex, how
much soever some men (shallow-witted only in evil speaking)
have sought to disgrace them. The elder is named Pamela, by
many men not deemed inferior to her sister : for my part when
I marked them both there was (if at least such perfection may
receive the word of more) more sweetness in Philoclea, but more
majesty in Pamela : methought love played in Philoclea's eyes and
threatened in Pamela's : methought Philoclea's beauty only persuaded, but so persuaded as all men must yield : Pamela's beauty
used violence, and such violence as no heart could resist. And it
seems that such proportion is between their minds. Philoclea
so bashful as though her excellence had stolen into her before
she was aware: so humble that she will put all pride out of
countenance: in sum, such proceedings as will stir hope, but
teach hope good manners : Pamela of high thoughts, who avoids
not pride by not knowing her own excellencies, but by making
that one of her excellencies to be void of pride; her mother's
wisdom, greatness, nobility, but (if I guess aright) knit with
more austere temper."

CHAP. III.]

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75

It naturally excites Pyrocles and Musidorus to hear that
Basileus, the King of Arcadia, keeps his two daughters, the
majestic Pamela and the sweet Philoclea, in seclusion. One
meeting suffices to make Pyrocles fall in love with Philoclea and
Musidorus with Pamela. After many adventures, in the course
of which Pyrocles, who has disguised himself as an Amazon, and
gets into trouble by involuntarily winning the affections of
Basileus, who thinks he is a woman, and of the queen, who sees
he is not, the novel ends happily with the desired marriage of
each. It is exceedingly lengthy, and containing many episodes
which have little interest in themselves, and which appear to
have no connection with the plot, the general effect is dull and
wearisome. It is very like what the Faery Queen would be
without its allegory and without the charm of its verse. Only
occasionally are we reminded that it was written by one of
the least conventional and most thoughtful of Euphuists. Only
occasionally occur those reflections which remind us of the quaint
philosophy of its author, of his deep-rooted belief in the wisdom of goodness. " It comes of every evil ground," he makes
Philanax say in his letter to Basileus, " that ignorance should
be the mother of faithfulness. O no, he cannot be good that
knows not why he is good, but stands so far good as his
fortune may keep him unassayed, but coming then to that, his
rude simplicity is either easily changed or easily deceived: and
so grows that to be the last excuse of his fault which seemed to
have been the first foundation of his faith," i.e.—for Sidney, in the
earnestness of his thought, forgets that polish and perspicuity of
style for which the Euphuists struggled—he means that ignorance
is made in the last resort the excuse for the crimes of one who
in the first instance grounded his virtues on ignorance.
But the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney was not even the
greatest literary triumph within the small sphere of Euphuistic
fashion. The work which was the most fashionable, the work
which indeed gave the name to this fashion, though the book,
in itself, was but the outcome of the movement, is Lyly's
Euphues. Michael Drayton speaks with great severity of Lyly
and his immediate followers as
"Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flys,
Playing with words and idle similes,
As th' English, Apes, and very Zanies be
Of everything, that they do hear and see,
So imitating his ridiculous tricks,
They spake and writ all like mere lunatics."

76

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

Indeed the test of an ordinary fashionable Euphuist was his
belief in a natural philosophy, which supposed certain animals
and vegetables to exist with peculiar properties for the purpose
of affording similes. Everything wTas viewed by the thorough
Euphuist from the point of view of its capacity for lending ornaments to style; the two classical languages were the only ones
considered worthy of attention, and these simply because in
them were found the best adornments of speech.
At college John Lyly, who, his biographer says, was always
averse " to the crabbed studies of logic and philosophy," paid
enough attention to Latin and Greek to be able in after-life to
drag in from them plentiful allusions and quotations; but the
spirit of these languages was never grasped by him or by any of
his followers; they wrere mines to be searched for phrases and
ornaments to a style which was made as elaborate as possible by
antithesis and alliteration. Although Lyly "did in a manner
neglect academical studies," like many more justly famous men
before and after him, yet not so much but that he was able to
take his degree and to become a Master of Arts in 1575. He then
began his unsuccessful career in catering for the fashionable
needs of a Court which refused to grant him the paltry reward
for which he had laboured. The Queen never gave him the
office of Master of the Eevels, for which he worked so hard; he
had no reward during his life save that of being considered at
the Court of Queen Elizabeth " a rare poet, witty, comical, and
facetious." The second petition he addressed to the Queen in
1593 is very characteristic in the mixed humour and rather
pathetic and elaborate quaintness of the thought and style of this
faithful and frank servant of fashion and straggler for popularity.
" Most gracious and dread sovereign, time cannot work my petitions the time. After many years' service it pleased your
majesty to except against tents and toils : I wish that for tents
I might put in tenements, so should be eased of some toils.
Some land, some good fines, or forfeitures should fall by the
just fall of these most false traitors, that seeing nothing will
come by the Revels, I may prey upon the Rebels. Thirteen years
your highness' servant but yet nothing: twenty friends that
though they say they will be sure, I find them sure to be slow.
A thousand hopes but all nothing, a hundred promises but
yet nothing. Thus casting up the inventory of my friends,
hopes, promises and times, the summa totalis amounteth to
just nothing. My last will is shorter than mine invention :
but 3 legacies, patience to my creditors, melancholy with-

CHAP. III.]

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77

out measure to my friends, and beggary without shame to my
family."
But John Lyly, in spite of his strivings after worldly prosperity,—in spite of his efforts after the elaboration and finish of
expression of which thought was but an adjunct,—deserves from
posterity a little of that popularity which was so largely
bestowed on him in his own day. For no one can read Lyly's
writings without feeling that within his small sphere he is a
perfect artist; that, as one of his biographers says, " his genie
was naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry and a r t ; " it
was " as if Apollo had given to him a wreath of his own bays
without snatching or struggling." He, in his small way, is like
the great founders of all schools; the rules and regulations that
he handed down to his followers were instinctively observed by
himself; what cost his followers effort and struggle was to him
a second nature. In his book Euphues take any passage and it
will be found, although abounding in the tedious machinery of
Euphuism, in the conceits, the puns, the alliterations, and the
antitheses that mark Euphuism, that its phrases on the whole
run gracefully and read easily, as if the writer had put them
down without conscious forethought or subsequent elaboration.
Take, for instance, the opening sentence of the book, which introduces Euphues to the reader : " There dwelt in Athens a young
gentleman of great patrimony, and of so comely a personage,
that it was doubted whether he were not more bound to Nature
for the lineaments of his person, or to Fortune for the increase of
his possessions. But nature, impatient of comparisons, and as it
were disdaining a companion or co-partner in her working, added
to this comeliness of his body, such a sharp capacity of mind,
that not only she proved fortune counterpart, but was half
of that opinion that she herself was only current. This young
gallant of more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth than
wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant conceits,
though himself superior to all in honest conditions, insomuch
that he thought himself so apt to all things that he gave himself almost to nothing but practising of those things commonly
which are incident to these sharp wits, fine phrases, smooth
quips, merry taunts, jesting without meane and abusing mirth
without measure. As therefore the sweetest rose hath his prickle,
the finest velvet his bracke, the fairest flower his branne, so the
sharpest wit hath his wanton will, and the holiest head his wicked
way." The sentences all flow smoothly and easily: it was no
effort to Lyly to make his antitheses and find his metaphors.

78

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

This easy style characterises the whole of the book: it is the
matter of the book that calls for most severe criticism, partly
because there is so little of it, and partly because what there is
is entirely borrowed. But Lyly was not aware, or apparently
he pretended that he was not aware, that his book could be
criticised as lacking in thought. In the dedication to Lord de
la Warre, he says that in it there are " more speeches which for
gravity will mislike the foolish than unseemly terms which for
vanity may offend the wise;" and so little attention does he pretend to have paid to style that he says he will probably not find
favour with the fine wits of the day, "with the dainty ear of the
curious sifter," who desire superfluous eloquence. With assumed
bitterness he speaks of his time: " It is a world to see how
Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than the language will
allow, to eat finer bread than is made of wheat, or wear finer
cloth than is made of wool." It will be seen that the young
gentleman, the hero of Lyly's two books, represents in readiness of wit and perfection of body the quality called Euphues by
Plato, of which, as the sum of those qualities which best fit for
education, we heard so much in Ascham's Schoolmaster. Indeed
Lyly was indebted to this excellent man, who was himself by no
means original, for most of the ideas and some of the plan of
the last part of the first book. Euphues goes to Italy and visits
Naples; and there meets an aged man, thoroughly believing in Erasmus's precept that experience is the storehouse of fools, and that
youth can be saved from all dangers by being well supplied with
good advice and sage precepts. This old gentleman, interested
in Euphues as possessing " a rare wit, which would in time either
breathe an intolerable trouble or bring an incomparable treasure
to the common weal . . . and having got an opportunity to
communicate with him his mind, with watery eyes, as one
lamenting his wantonness, and smiling face, as one loving his
wittiness, encountered him in this manner," and by quoting many
general moral principles and precepts, illustrating them by countless metaphors, and ornamenting them by many classical allusions,
he concludes with a general exhortation to be temperate. " Let
thy attire be comely but not too costly, thy diet wholesome but
not excessive: use pastime as the word importeth to pass the
time in honest recreation. Mistrust no man without cause,
neither be thou credulous without proof," etc. etc. That this
advice did not find favour with the young and excitable Euphues
is sufficiently proved by the frankness of his answer, in which
he asks his aged friend if he can see no difference between " the

CHAP. III.]

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79

young nourishing bay tree and the old withered beech," and
before he can put in a word departs, leaving " this old gentleman in a great quandarie." Euphues thus proves himself desirous
to see life for himself, and then begin his troubles, which, according to the belief of the day, he would probably have avoided had
he taken the old gentleman's advice and not "disdained the
counsels of age." He makes a great friend of Philautus, a man
of his own age, who introduces him to his betrothed Lucilla.
Euphues wins the affections of Lucilla, and thus a quarrel grows
up between Euphues and Philautus, which is eventually cured
by the further faithlessness of Lucilla, who marries one Curio.
Euphues then has a moment of despondency: he laments not
having taken the advice of Eubulus; he laments the waste of his
life, which has been spent in courting ladies; the waste of his
lands, which have been spent in maintenance of bravery; the
waste of his wit in idle sonnets. He will endeavour to amend
all that is past, and, if need be, live alone and die in the company
of books. He commences by adopting towards Philautus and
society generally the tone of an adviser. He writes first " the
cooling card" for Philautus and for all fond lovers, which
serves to cement their renewed friendship. It is to be the saving
of all those that find themselves in love. " Come therefore to
me all ye lovers that have been deceived by fancy, the glass of
pestilence, or deluded by women, the gate to perdition; be as
earnest to seek a medicine as you were eager to run into a mischief; the earth bringeth forth as well endive to delight the
people, as hemlock to endanger the patient, as well the use to
distil, as the nettle to sting, as well the bee to give honey, as
the spider to yield poison." As far as we can gather, for the
drift of the " cooling card " is obscured by its wordy and elaborate
language, vain lovers are to quench the passion at any cost.
" This is therefore to admonish all young imps and novices in
love, not to blow the coals of fancy with desire: but to quench
them with disdain."
Repairing to Athens to follow his own private study, and
" calling to mind his former looseness, and how in his youth he
had misspent the time, he thought to give a caveat to all parents
how they might bring their children up in virtue; and a commandment to all youth, how they should frame themselves to
their father's instructions." He writes a letter to the grave
matrons and honest maidens of Italy, and an essay on Education,
called " Euphues and his Euphebus," copied almost entirely from
Ascham; and with a letter to the gentlemen and scholars of

80

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

Athens, and letters written to various friends, the first book of
Euphues concludes. I t was published as a complete book in
1579, and it was not till 1580 that Lyly published Euphues and
his England. This book contains a letter " to my very good
friends the gentlemen scholars of Oxford," who were supposed to
have been offended by Lyly's implied criticisms on university
teaching in " Euphues and his Euphebus." " In the first part of
the Euphues" says Prof. Morley, "Lyly satisfies his conscience ;
in the second part the Court." Lyly's conscience was evidently
small and easily satisfied, if we are to judge by the trifling
amount of genuine thought and conviction, of traces of independent judgment, contained in the first book : yet it is only too
evident in the second book, by his shameless flattery of England,
Elizabeth, and the Court, that he is exerting himself with the
utmost zeal to please. Euphues and Philautus go to England,
where they first make the acquaintance of a moralising old man,
who keeps bees, and with a young lady called Camilla, with whom
Philautus falls in love. But she eventually marries Lucius, and
he consoles himself with a young lady called Violet. Euphues
retires to Athens, where he lives "in the contemplation of his
old grief."
This second book of Euphues shows forcibly how the ideas
and thoughts of the best Elizabethan chivalry had become
degenerate and exaggerated. Patriotism had become but exaggerated and fulsome praise of everything in England, loyalty
but an unthinking and servile panegyric on Elizabeth \ the high
ideas of a life which should be pure and heroic, devoted to the
best ends, resolved themselves into the moral platitudes which
Euphues and his friends are continually administering ; and
lastly, that worship of women, as the inspirers of the highest life,
had become merely grotesque and ridiculous flattery. " I for
mine own part," says Euphues, "am brought into a paradise by
the only imagination of women's virtues, and were I persuaded
that all the devils in hell were women, I would never live devoutly to inherit heaven; or that they were all saints in heaven,
I would live more strictly for fear of hell. What could Adam
have done in his Paradise before the fall without a woman, or
how could he have risen again after his fall without a woman %
Artificers are wont in their last works to excel themselves, yea,
God when He had made all things at the last, made man as
most perfect, thinking nothing could be framed as more excellent,
yet after him He created a woman, the expresse image of Eternity,
the lively picture of nature, the only steel glass for man to behold

CHAP. III.]

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81

his infirmities by comparing them with women's perfections."
Nevertheless Lyly's book is interesting even to posterity, although
it be not swayed by the fashion which recognised in it all that
propriety could wish. It is certainly amusing, though we may
not be sure, in reading some of the passages, whether we are
laughing with Lyly or at him. The book cannot fail to interest us
as a valuable monument of that time of impetuous study of style
and externals, of that worship of foreign models so opposed to
the instincts of the rugged English mind; and also it cannot fail
to attract as being the spontaneous product of a quaintly-talented
mind, whose expression, though artificial and conventional, was
never stiff and laboured.
It is in the literature of criticism that the good effects of this
discipline, of which Lyly's work is the purest and boldest result,
begin to show themselves. The most interesting prose works of
this period, if we except Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, a work
which struck out altogether a new line in prose style, are the
works of poetic and literary criticism, from among which stands
out prominently the Apologie for Poetrie. Webbe's Discourse on
English Poetrie, written " with the intention of stirring up others
of meet ability to bestow travail on the matter," and Puttenham's
Art of English Poetrie, dealing first with the nature of poets -and
poetry, the claims of poets and poetry to dignity and honour;
and then, secondly, with the technique of poetry, with the
measure and proportion and the shaping of verse. But this
"poor gentleman," as Sir John Harrington said of Puttenham,
" laboureth greatly to prove or rather to make poetry an art, and
reciteth as you may see in the plural number, some pluralities
of patterns and parcels of his own poetry with divers pieces of
Partheniads and hymns in praise of the most praiseworthy; yet
whatsoever he would prove by all these, sure in my poor opinion
he doth prove nothing more plainly than that which Mr. Sidney
and all the learneder sort that have written of it, do pronounce,
viz., that it is a gift and not an a r t ; I say he proveth it, because
making himself and so many others so cunning in the art, yet
he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it, deserving to be commended as Martiall praiseth one that he compares to Tully."
" Carmiiia quod scribis et Apolline imllo
Laudari debes, hoc Ciceronis habes."
The Apologie for Poetrie, though written in 1581, was probably
not printed till 1595; so Sir John Harrington, who wrote this
in the preface to Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verses
G

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THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

in 1591, may have seen it in manuscript. It was called forth
by the controversy which followed the publication of a book
called The Schoole of Abuse, by Stephen Gosson, " containing a
pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and
such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag
of defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing
their bulwarks by profane writers, natural sense and common
experiment."
He plunged with zeal into the controversy,
which had broken out as early as 1576, concerning the morality
or immorality of plays, theatres, and poetry and art generally.
The clergy habitually attacked art of all kinds; a preacher
at St. Paul's Cross in 1577 condemning the theatre in a sermon of unanswerable logic, which connected plays closely with
plagues. " The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well,
and the cause of sin are plays, therefore the cause of plagues
are plays." Also another preacher, in 1578, at St. Paul's Cross
expresses his surprise that " a filthy play, with the blast of a
trumpet, will sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour's tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred." But the zeal of
Gosson was somewhat too puritanic; he laid so much stress on
the abuse of art, which he seemed thoroughly to understand, and
so little stress on its use, which he seemed not to understand at
all, that Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated the book, was
apparently displeased with the tendency it showed to discourage
art. Edmund Spenser, writing to Gabriel Harvey in 1579, says :
" New books I hear of none, but only of one that writing a
certain book, called The School of Abuse, and dedicating it to
Master Sidney, was for his labor scorned : if at least, it be in
the goodness of that nature to scorn. Such folly is it not to
regard af orehand the inclination and qualitie of him to whom we
dedicate our books."
" With quiet judgment looking a little deeper into it," Sidney,
in his Apologie for Poetrie, establishes the reasons for the existence of poetry, and for the respect in which it should be held.
He shows himself to have a real and spontaneous feeling for
art, and yet at the same time the reasons that he gives for its
existence point to that deeply-rooted admiration for moral worth,
that tendency to value things according as they bore directly on
morality, which in a less artistic nature would have produced
puritanism of the most crushing and narrowing sort. It is hard
to believe that we have to do with a " courtly maker," with a
writer of chivalric sonnets, who was as capable as his masters of
producing verses empty of all thought and feeling, filled mainly

GHAP. III.]

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83

with elaborate conceits and ingenious metaphors—when we hear
him say : " Verse is no cause but only an ornament to poetry."
Certainly, in this little book, his sense of his responsibility as
champion of art, the necessity he felt of proving that art is a
high and ennobling influence, made him as simple in style as he
is earnest in thought, and so the Apologie for Poetrie remains not
only as the best expression of Sidney's individuality, but also
as the best specimen of Elizabethan prose style, before Hooker and
Bacon had written and given to it a deeper and nobler character.
He begins by saying that poetry should not only be highly
thought of because of its antiquity, its universality, because the
best minds in the past gave it dignity and reverence, but also
because it is the greatest and most effective moral teacher that
the world possesses. Virtue is the end of all action, and poetry
teaches virtue better than anything else—better than history,
which teaches by example—better than philosophy, which teaches
by precept. History is tied down to the actual facts of the
world, to the truth of a foolish world, which is not always elevating or ennobling; whereas the poet, " lifted up with the
vigor of his own invention," sees what things ought to be and
what they might be. It is for this reason that the Komans
called a poet a prophet, and the Greeks a maker. They felt
that a poet is the prophet who can construct out of present facts
that vision of a glorious future which is to stimulate men to a
noble life. It is more stimulating to a noble life than philosophy,
for philosophy can only tell what ought to be done—it cannot
give that incitement to virtue that poetry can. " Methinks," says
Sidney of the moral philosophers, " I see them coming towards
me with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by
daylight, rudely clothed for to witness outwardly their contempt
of outward things, with books in their hands against glory, whereto
they set their names, sophistically speaking against subtlety, and
angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger :
these men casting largesse as they go of Definitions, Divisions, and
distinctions, with a scornful interrogative do soberly ask whether
it be possible to find any path, so ready to lead a man to virtue,
as that which teacheth what virtue is ? and teacheth it not only
by delivering forth its very being, its causes and effects: but
also by making known its enemy vice which must be destroyed,
and its cumbersome servant passion which must be mastered,
by showing the generalities that containeth it, and the specialities
that are derived from it. Lastly, by plain setting down, how it
extendeth itself out of the limits of a man's own little world, to

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[CHAP. H I .

the government of families and maintaining of public societies."
But the " peerless poet . . . doth not only show the way, but giveth
so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter
into it. Nay, he doth as if your journey should lie through a
fair vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of grapes : that full
of that taste, you may long to pass further. He beginneth not
with obscure definitions which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness : but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of
music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you : with a tale
which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney
corner." That Sidney could make prose not only charming, but
that he could make it also the vehicle of reasoning,—that he could
select and arrange his facts with reference to his point,—is shown
by the arguments which constitute his Apologiefor Poetrie, and by
the summary which he gives of them at the close. " Sith then
poetry is of all humane learning the most ancient and of most
fatherly antiquitie, as from whence other learnings have taken
their beginnings : sith it is so universall, that no learned nation
doth despise it, nor no barbarous nation is without i t : sith both
Roman and Greek gave divine names unto i t : the one of pro^
phecying the other of making. And that indeed, that name of
making is fit for him ; considering, that where as other arts retain
themselves within their subject, and receive, as it were, their
being from i t : the poet only bringeth his own stuff, and doth
not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a
conceit: sith neither his description, nor his end, containeth any
evil, the thing described cannot be evil : sith his effects be so
good as to teach goodness and delight his learners : sith therein
(namely, in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledges) he doth
not only far pass the historian, but for instructing is well nigh
comparable to the Philosopher, and for moving leaves him
behind : sith the Holy Scripture (wherein there is no uncleanness) hath whole parts in it poetical, and that even our Saviour
Christ, vouchsafed to use the flowers of it : sith all his kindes
are not only in their united forms, but in their severed dissections
fully commendable, I think (and think I think rightly) the Laurel
crown appointed for triumphing captains, doth worthily (of all
other learnings) honor the poets triumph."
Then Sidney proceeds to answer the more detailed accusations
that have been brought against poetry—that it is a waste of
time, that it is the mother of lies, that Plato banished poets

CHAP. III.]

PEOSE.

85

from his ideal commonwealth; all which he answers from the
high moral point of view that underlies his whole argument,
fully admitting the bad effects of art when it is abused and
degenerate, but repeating again and again in different words
that the ill effects of art are not to be put down to art itself,
but to the fact "that by few men Art can be accomplished."
His views on the art of his day are interesting, both because
he was a man of instinctive taste, and also because any
judgment by a contemporary of contemporary art is always
valuable. Chaucer had wants; " b u t I know not whether to
marvel more," he says, " either that he in that misty time could
see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly
after him." The Mirror for Magistrates, The Earl of Surrey's
Lyrics, The Shepherd's Calendar, are singled out for commendation ; but " besides these do I not remember to have seen
but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical sinews in
them: for proof whereof let but most of the verses be put in
prose and then ask the meaning : and it will be found that one
verse did but beget another without ordering at the first, what
should be at the last, which becomes a confused mass of words,
with a tingling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason."
Sidney thus bears testimony to the fact that the Elizabethan
age, as well as many others, suffered from the plague of minor
poets. The value of his dramatic criticism is somewhat marred
by the fact of his clinging to the classic convention of the three
unities of time, place, and action, which were to rule the drama.
In his general condemnation he cannot except Gorboduc, though
he commends it as containing stately speeches and well-sounding
phrases, and "full of notable moralitie, which it doth delightfully teach;" but it is disobedient to what he thinks are the
essentials of true dramatic art.
"How much more in all the
rest, where you shall see Asia of the one side and Affrick of the
other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when
he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the
tale will not be conceived. Now ye shall have three ladies walk
to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a
garden. By and by, we hear news of shipwreck in the same
place, and then we are to blame, if we accept it not for a Eock.
Upon the back of that, comes out a hideous monster, with fire
and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take
it for a cave. While in the meanwhile 2 armies fly in, represented with 4 swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart
will not receive it for a pitched field. Now of time they are

86

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

[CHAP. H I .

much more liberal: for ordinary it is that 2 young princes
fall in love. After many traverses she is got with childe, delivered
of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is
ready to get another child: and all this in 2 hours space :
which how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine and
Art hath taught and all ancient examples justified : and at this
day the ordinary players in Italy will not err in."
Sidney concludes what he calls " this ink-wasting toy of mine "
by flinging at those who should continue to scorn the sacred
mysteries of poetry, a truly Euphuistic curse, " that while you
live, you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a
sonnet: and that when you die, your memory die from the earth
for want of an epitaph."

CHAPTER IV.
SPENSER.

SPEESEB,, b. 1552. At Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, from 1569-1576 ; in
London, acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney, and in Lord Leicester's
household, 1579 ; goes to Ireland as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton,
1580 ; returns to London with Sir "Walter Raleigh in 1589 ; returns
to Ireland, 1591 ; his marriage, 1594 ; visits London, 1595 ; rebellion
in Munster obliges him to return to London ; d. Jan. 16, 1598-99.
Translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay, written about 1569 ; The
Shepherd's Calendar, 1580 ; First three books of the Faery Queen,
1590 ; Complaints, 1591; Second instalment of Faery Queen (4-6),
Jan. 1595-96; Colin Clout's Come Home Againe, 1595; Amoretti
Sonnets, 1595 ; Fpithalamion, 1595.

SPENSER is distinguished among poets not only because he opened
a new epoch in the history of Elizabethan art, but because his
was one of the most purely poetic natures that ever artist possessed. Charles Lamb calls him the " poet's poet." His has been
the inspiration of many poets of succeeding ages—of Milton, of
Browne, and of the Fletchers. Cowley, when a boy, read the
Faery Queen, and became "irrecoverably a poet." He was
Dryden's master in English. Pope in his old age was enthusiastic about the Faery Queen. " I read the Faery Queen when I
was about twelve with a vast deal of delight: and I think it
gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago."
Collins, Gray, Thomson, Akenside, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats, all came under his influence. They all felt the inspiration of that delicate, sensitive spirit, of that refined, fantastic
genius, which was nourished by the seclusion in which it
lived—
" Fashioning worlds of fancies evermore."
Spenser was born in 1552. London was his birthplace, though,
as he says in the Prothalamion,—
" From another place I take my name,
A house of ancient fame."

88

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

He claimed kinship with the family of the Spensers of Althorpe :
it was to the " sisters three " of this family, Lady Carey, Lady
Compton, and Lady Strange, that he dedicated three of his
minor poems : to Lady Strange The Tears of the Muses ; Mother
Hubbard's Tale to Lady Compton; and Muiopotmos to Lady
Carey. Spenser, with his chivalrous and aristocratic leanings,
would be glad to claim kinship with a noble family. To him
noble blood was the natural source of all that was courteous and
noble and brave. Sir Calidore, in the Faery Queen, admiring
Tristram,—
" that gentle boy
Which had himself so stoutly well acquit,
Seeing his face so lovely, stern, and coy,
And hearing th' answers of his pregnant wit,
He prays'd it much, and much admir'd it :
That sure he weened him born of noble blood
With whom these graces did so goodly fit."

He is surprised that one who is "of mean parentage and kindred base " should be decked
" With wondrous gifts of nature's grace."
Spenser's early education was given to him at the Merchant
Taylors' School, and in 1569 he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. A pathetic picture is given by a contemporary
of the privation and sufferings of the poorer scholars at the
University. If Spenser led the same life as they did, as his
poverty would probably oblige him to do, it must greatly have
tended to increase his ascetic and puritan tendencies. Two of
the most important friendships of his life were made at college :
one with Edward Kirke, the E. K. of The Shepherd's Calendar,
of whom little is known, his only claim to fame being the
English of his preface to The Shepherds Calendar, and his high
and almost prophetic appreciation of the talents of his friend.
" But I doubt not, so soon as his name shall come into the
knowledge of men, and his worthiness be sounded in the trump
of fame, but that he shall be not only kist but also beloved of
all, embraced of the most, and wondered at of the best."
Spenser's other friend, Gabriel Harvey, is better known to fame,
as a much-esteemed and respected critic, engaged in vindictive
literary quarrels, and much tormented by Nash; known also
through Spenser's affectionate lines :—
" Harvey, the happy above happiest men
I read ; that sitting like a looker-on

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER.

89

Of this world's stage, dost note with critic pen
The sharp dislikes of each condition ;
And as one careless of suspicion
Ne fawnest for the favor of the great,
Ne fearest foolish reprehension
Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat,
But freely dost of what thee list entreat
Like a great lord of peerless liberty ;
Lifting the good up to high honour's seat ;
And the evil damning ever more to die ;
For life and death is in thy doomful writing,
So thy renown lives ever by enditing."

To Gabriel Harvey Spenser was " a devoted friend during life ; "
and this devotion to one who was by no means so immaculate in
taste as Spenser supposes him to be, was rather dangerous to the
development of the poet's genius. Harvey was the leader of that
school who wished to make English verse conform to classical
rules. To this unpatriotic and mistaken school Spenser for some
short time belonged, and wrote some poems under its influence.
" Unhappie verse, the witnesse of my unhappy state,
Make thyself fluttering wings of thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth unto my Love wheresoe'er she be."

Attempts such as this at trimetre iambics, together with
other " unhappie verse," the results of his efforts at wTriting
English hexameters, were later turned into ridicule by him.
Even whilst under the influence of the school he seems half
conscious that these efforts were not successful or promising.
" I like your English hexameter so exceedingly well," he writes
to Harvey, " that I also enure my pen sometime in that
kind, which I find indeed, as I have often heard you defend in
word, neither so hard nor so harsh but that it will easily yield
itself to our mother tongue. For the only or chiefest hardness
which seemeth, is in the accent, which sometime gapeth and as
it were yawneth ill-favoredly, coming short of that it should, and
sometimes exceeding the measure of the number as in ' Carpenter:'
the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it shall be
read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one
leg after h e r ; and Heaven being used short as one syllable,
when it is in verse stretched out with diastole, is like a lame dog
that holds up one leg."
How far Harvey's influence may have been beneficial in
training and disciplining Spenser's genius—how far it was dangerous as encouraging Spenser's very strong tendency to be
artificial—cannot be estimated. For any lesser mind Harvey's

90

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

influence would have been crushing. If his genius had not
known itself and been strong enough to follow its own instincts,
Spenser might have followed Harvey's advice, and have taken to
an art that was just coming into fashion, and thus have become an
artificial playwright instead of an excellent and imaginative poet.
" He was standing," says Mr. Church, " at the parting of the
ways. The allegory, with all its tempting associations and
machinery, with its ingenuities and pictures and boundless
license to vagueness and fancy, was on one side; and on the
other the drama, with its prima facie and superficially prosaic
aspects, and its kinship to what was customary and commonplace and unromantic in human life." Spenser made nine
attempts in the dramatic line; and he sent these nine comedies,
composed on the model of those of Ariosto and Machiavelli and
other Italians, to Gabriel Harvey in 1579, together with a portion of the Faery Queen. " And must you of necessity have my
judgment of her indeed V' writes Gabriel Harvey in return. " To
be plain, I am void of all judgment; if your Nine Comedies,
whereunto, in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the
9 muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily), come not
nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the fineness of plausible
elocution, or the rareness of poetical invention, than that Elvish
Queen doth to his Orlando Furioso, which notwithstanding you
will needs seem to emulate and hope to overgo, as you flatly
professed yourself in one of your last letters. . . . But I will
not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If so be your
Fairy Queen be fairer in your own eye than the 9 muses, and
Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo : mark what
t say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there is an
end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good
angel put you in a better mind." Happily for posterity the
"good angel" for which Harvey longed did not appear, and
Spenser, instead of attempting to deal with the real world as a
dramatist,—an attempt for which, by the nature of his vague
fantastic mind, he was unfitted,—followed the natural bent of his
genius, and imagined another and a different world, in which his
fancies could wander free and unchecked.
Probably immediately after Spenser left Cambridge he came
under an influence which acted as a direct stimulus to production.
He met Rosalind, who inspired him with "that chivalrous devotion
that not even her refusal and her preference for another could
destroy." Rosalind was to Spenser what Geraldine was to
Surrey and Stella to Sidney: she was to a certain extent that

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER.

91

conventional object of adoration which every poet must possess
as the inspirer and object of his writings :
" He loved as was his lot, a lady gent;"
but at the same time he had for her a sincere reverence and regard,
which rarely allowed him to reproach her with bitterness for the
disdain of his suit, as was the custom with the conventional adorer.
" Not then to her that scorned thing so base,
But to myself the blame that lookt so high ;
So high her thoughts as she herself have place,
And loath each lowly thing with lofty eye.
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant
To simple swain, sith her I may not love :
Yet that I may her honor paravant,
And praise her worth, though far my wit above,
Such grace shall be some guerdon for the grief,
And long affliction which I have endured."
In 1580 her image was for a moment obscured by an " altera
Eosalinda," who is saluted by Harvey as "Domina Immerito
mea bellissima Colina Clouta." But we soon cease to hear of
her, and the old Eosalind again resumes her sway, never to be
again deposed. The remembrance of this early love still remains
strongly with him, even after his marriage in 1594 to a lady to
whom he was deeply and sincerely attached. His feeling for
Eosalind gave Spenser a theme. "The unknown Eosalind
had given an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a
colour to his thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser in that band
and order of poets,—with one exception, not the greatest order,—
to whom the wonderful passion of love, in its heights and in its
depths, is the element on which their imagination works, and
out of which it moulds its most beautiful and characteristic
creations."
"For Love is Lord of truth and Loyalty,'
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky.
Such is the power of that sweet passion,
That it all sordid basenesse doth expell,
And the refined mind doth newly fashion
Unto a fairer form."—An Eymne to Love.
It was probably in 1579 that Spenser contracted another
great friendship of his life, which had a powerful influence on
his career. Sir Philip Sidney, " the noble and virtuous gentleman most worthy of all titles of learning and chivalry," had

92

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

recognised the unusual genius of Spenser, and Spenser in his
turn was fascinated by the attractive personality, the noble and
beautiful character, of Sidney. By him he was introduced to
his uncle the Earl of Leicester, and also to the Queen. Thus
he was brought altogether into that atmosphere of the court,
which, although from some aspects refined and noble, had its
affected and artificial side. Happily, Spenser was soon removed
from these surroundings, which might have proved dangerous
to his genius. In 1580 he went to Ireland as secretary to Lord
Grey of Wilton.
Ireland was at that time a serious danger to England.
Elizabeth, with characteristic parsimony, had increased the difficulty by refusing to allow enough money to her deputies to
suppress insurrections with a strong hand, and thus establish
respect for England's authority. She had recourse to means
which proved only of temporary success, and sowed lasting seeds
of discontent and turbulence.
She took advantage of the
enmity of rival chieftains to dispense with the necessity of sending men and money over to Ireland. In their own interest,
therefore, to gratify personal revenge, Irish chieftains would
fight the Queen's battles, suppressing rebellion for a time, but in
the end augmenting the widespread anarchy of the unhappy
island. Added to internal dissensions was the disturbing fact
that Philip of Spain looked upon Ireland as a convenient means
of harassing England. Only when this fact became apparent
did Elizabeth see the real urgency of the situation, and, overcoming her habitual inclination to parsimony, granted to her deputies
full power and adequate supplies. Two years before Lord Grey
was appointed deputy, Sir Henry Sidney had held the office, and,
in spite of wisdom and firmness, had entirely failed to preserve
order. Then Ireland had been left to the local administration,
and its state became worse than ever. " No governor shall do
any good here," wrote an English observer, " except he show
himself a Tamerlane." Lord Grey, a stern Puritan, thought
that he saw in Ireland the great struggle going on between the
true faith Protestantism, championed by England, and Antichrist, represented by Philip of Spain, the champion of
Catholicism. With the furious zeal of a religious bigot he
dealt with the rebellious Irish, the helpless colleagues of Philip.
" If taking of cows and killing of kerns and churles had been
worth advertising," he writes to the Queen, " I would have had
every day to have troubled your highness." His cruel and
merciless behaviour towards the Irish, which he in his own

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER

93

mind justified as the righteous conduct of a crusader against
wrong, eventually brought down upon him the censure of the
English Government.
Recorded among his services to the Government is the
slaying of "1485 chief men and gentlemen, not accounting
those of meaner sort, nor yet executions by law, and killing of
churls, which were unnumerable." In 1582 he was recalled.
Spenser had been with him through all: he had been with him
at the surrender of Smerwick, when 600 Spaniards were
massacred in cold blood: he had witnessed all the cruelties
wliich Lord Grey had thought it his duty to inflict on the
helpless Irish; and through all Spenser had admired him. He
was to Spenser the embodiment of all that was just and strong
and sincere; he was as much Spenser's ideal of life from the
stronger and sterner side, as was Sidney from the brighter and
lighter side. Like Lord Grey, he saw only one side of the
struggle in Ireland : it was to him but a crusade of the right
against the wrong: he and Lord Grey looking on, while the
English soldiers murdered right and left, felt as much in the right
as did the Jews in the massacring the Jebusites or the Hivites.
Stern, however, as were the facts of life with which Spenser was
first brought face to face in Ireland, they did not in their
horror oppress or overwhelm the fantastic imagination of the
poet: they rather gave body and colour to his imaginative world.
The struggle of virtue and vice in the Faery Queen naturally
had distinctness and vividness given to it by the remembrance,
the scenes and experiences, of his Irish life.
Spenser did not return to England with Lord Grey in the
spring of 1581. He had been appointed Clerk of Decrees and
Recognisances in the Irish Court of Chancery. It was not till
later that he again became directly connected with England and
her interests. A plan for the planting of Munster had been
started before the Rebellion, and after Desmond had been crushed
it was again revived; and when Spenser succeeded Ludovic
Bryskett as Clerk to the Council of Munster, he was thus brought
into communication with the powerful English noblemen who
were on this council, and with those who were interested in the
scheme of colonisation, among whom were Sir Christopher
Hatton, Walsingham, and Sir Walter Raleigh. The latter made
an important epoch in the life of Spenser. Since about the year
1586 Spenser had lived at the Castle of Kilcolman, a half-ruined
house of the Desmonds, granted to him by the council probably
through the interest of some of his friends. In this castle,

94

SPENSER

[CHAP. IV.

situated on the margin of a small lake, and overlooking a dreary
tract of country, Spenser wrote his Faery Queen. His fantastic
imagination was fostered by solitude. Some minds, such, for
instance, as that of the American Hawthorne, develop in their
solitude weird and dusky, almost morbid, fancies: Spenser's
imagination became more fantastic, more distant from the real
world, but it remained always bright and healthy. Sadness
and melancholy as moods never seem to take possession of him:
when he is sad or melancholy it is always from some external
cause. In solitude he found the healthy conditions of his genius :
active life—the life of the court in England—would have jarred
his sensitive nerves, and have torn the delicate web of his
fancy. Thus he always returned gladly to the lonely house at
Kilcolman.
In 1589 Ealeigh came to Ireland after his unprofitable expedition to Lisbon and his temporary disgrace with the Queen,
during the ascendency of Essex. He came to look after his
estates, his lawsuits, the carrying out of further schemes, and it
chanced that he visited Spenser, who was his neighbour, at Kilcolman. " He gan," says Spenser,
" To cast great liking to my lore
And great disliking to my luckless lot,
That banisht had myself, like wight forlore,
Into that waste where I was quite forgot.
He me persuaded forth with him to fare.
Nought took I with me, but mine oaten quill,
Small needments else need shepherd to prepare.
So to the sea we came; the sea that is
A world of waters heaped up on high,
Boiling like mountains in wide wilderness :
Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse crie."
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.

In 1590, therefore, taking with him the three first books of
the Faery Queen, he went to England with Ealeigh, who—for
some reason restored to favour—introduced him at court, and
instructed him in the art of flattery, which was so necessary to
one who would gain the favour of the Virgin Queen. It was
not long before Spenser was a proficient in the art, and could
write in adequate verse of " t h e matchless beauty," the "pure
perfection," the consummate poetic talent, of this Queen, for
whom no flattery was too gross. In Colin Clouts Come Home
Againe he sings of her brilliant court, of the beauty of its

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER.

95

ladies, of the bravery and courtesy of its knights; but he had
also seen the duller aspects of it. His Puritan nature was jarred
by the affectation, the want of sincerity, the struggle for fame
and favour, that went on there.
" Where each one seeks with malice, and with strife,
To thrust clown others into foul disgrace
Himself to raise : and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceitful wit
In subtle shifts, and finest sleights devise,
Either by slandering his well deemed name
Through leasings lewd, and fained forgerie,
Or else by breeding him some blot of blame,
By creeping close into his secrecy.
"Whiles single Truth and simple Honestie
I)o wander up and down despised of a l l ;
Their plain attire such glorious gallantry
Disdaines so much, that none them on doth call."
In appreciation, perhaps, of his real merit,—certainly pleased
with the poet's flattery,—Elizabeth gave to Spenser a pension of
£50 a year, which her parsimonious Lord Treasurer, it is said,
made many difficulties about paying.
Spenser stayed in England about a year and a half, hoping,
it is thought, for the gift of some larger pension or some office
from his great friends. But they were busy with their own
schemes, and apparently left Spenser to eat out his heart with
fruitless waiting.
" Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
Hath brought to court, to sue for hadywist
That few have found, and many one hath mist.
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide ;
To lose good days, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ;
To have thy Princes' grace, yet want her Peeres ;
To have thy asking yet wait many years ;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone ;
Unhappie wight, borne to disastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendance spend."
Mother Hubbard's Tale.
In 1591 Spenser returned to Ireland. In 1594 he married
a lady of whom all we know is that her name is Elizabeth—

96

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

'' My love, my life's best ornament,
By whom my spirit out of dust was raised."
To her he wrote his sonnets. F r o m t h e m we gather t h a t it
was some time before she would listen to h i m ; t h e first sonnets
are the rather ordinary and commonplace expressions of t h e conventional agony of t h e lover—
"So do I weep and wail and plead in vain,
Whiles she as steel and flint doth still remain."
When she relents he blesses his lot
" that was so lucky placed,
But then the more your own mishap I rue,
That are so much by so mean love embased."
H e resolves t h a t in r e t u r n for her love he will make her immortal
by his verse—
"One day I wrote her name upon the strand ;
But came the waves and washed it away ;
Again I wrote it with a second hand ;
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize ;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, quod I ; let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame ;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
"Where, when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live and later life renew,"
F o r some years he lived quietly, and probably happily, with
his wife a t K i l c o l m a n ; b u t in 1598 t h e rebellion, stirred u p by
Tyrone in Ulster in 1594, reached Munster. Tyrone sent a
force into Munster, and the province rose. Shortly before Spenser
h a d been appointed sheriif of t h e county. H e was therefore a
marked man, besides possessing an estate t h a t belonged to t h e
old E a r l of Desmond. Kilcolman was sacked and burned. Spenser
himself and his wife escaped; b u t Ben Jonson records t h a t
Spenser's youngest child perished in t h e flames. H e came over
to England, and perhaps, ruined and heartbroken as he was, he
welcomed t h a t shade
''Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseen,"
t h a t came to him on J a n u a r y 16, 1599. Jonson says " h e died
for lack of bread in K i n g Street (Westminster), and refused

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER

m

20 pieces sent him by my Lord of Essex, saying that he had no
time to spend them." He was buried in Westminster, near
the grave of Chaucer, " that sacred, happy spirit," who had been
one of the great inspirations of his life,
"Who taught me, homely as I am, to make,"
Spenser's works fall into two great groups, each corresponding
to the two great divisions of his life. From 1576 till 1580
Spenser was in England writing as a comparatively unemancipated poet, still under the oppressive classical influences represented by his friend Harvey, and those still more stultifying
and artificial influences of chivalry and the court. Nevertheless
it was in this period that he produced The Shepherd's Calendar,
which, as Mr. Lowell says, marks a new epoch in poetry as much as
did the poetry of Thomson and Collins, following on the conventional productions of the eighteenth century school. Yet it was not
till he was in Ireland, living in that comparative seclusion which
allowed his imagination free play, that he achieved his best work—
that he allowed his genius to follow its own instincts, and thus
to accomplish a poem which had not only freshness of style and
beauty of versification to recommend it, but also the finer colouring, deeper thought and imagination, which belongs to freer and
maturer genius.
From 1576 to 1580 Spenser's writings may on the whole be
said to be tentative, giving indeed promise, but, contrasted with
his maturer works, comparatively emancipated. He was in this
period an excellent court-poet, pleasing by his beautiful verse
and delicate fancy. The fetters of eighteenth century convention
were perhaps not stronger, than were those of Elizabethan
chivalry; and it was difficult for Spenser to struggle against them,
and from a certain point of view he never did really throw them
off. Spenser's genius always had its peculiar fantastic vision of
things : it might always perhaps be called artificial, in the sense
of never being able to view things as they really were : the difference between him in his first and second period is that in the
first he looked at the world with the eyes of his generation,
making it of course fresher and more charming by the strength
of his genius; while in the second period he made his own
illusions, wove his web of fancy for himself. Though he never
could see the world and the people in it as they really were,—
though he never had the highest power of an artist, the capacity
for idealising the true and the actual,—yet he made for himself
H

98

SPENSER.

[CHAP, IV.

a charming, fantastic, pure, and ideal world, which his genius
also makes real for those who follow him.
Spenser's first ventures in verse are some translations of
sonnets by Petrarch, and some " Yisions " by Joachim du Bellay.
They were written probably in the transition time between school
and college, and appeared in a strange and miscellaneous collection, called by the collector, John Vander JNToodt, " a theatre
wherein be represented as well the miseries and calamities which
follow the voluptuous worldlings, as also the great joys and
pleasures which the Faithful do enjoy—an argument both profitable and delectable to all that sincerely love the word of God."
It was probably at Sidney's house at Penshurst that The
Shepherd's Calendar was written, but it was pure friendship and
not merely gratitude for hospitality, and a desire to pay the
tribute due from a dependant to a patron, that caused Spenser
to dedicate it to Sir Philip Sidney. In the prefatory letter addressed to Gabriel Harvey, Edward Kirke speaks with great scorn
of the " rout of our ragged rhymers (for so themselves use to hunt
the letter) which without learning boast, without judgment
jangle, without reason, rage and foam as if some instinct of
poetical spirit had newly ravished them above the meanness of
common capacity." The new poet that he introduces will
appeal to intelligent and judicious readers, " by his wittiness in
devising, his pithiness in uttering, his complaints of love so
lovely, his discourses of pleasure so pleasantly, his pastoral rudeness, his moral wiseness, his due observing of decorum everywhere, in personages, in seasons, in matter, in speech, and
generally in all seemly simplicitie of handling his matters, and
framing his words." On the latter point, however, critics were
not agreed. Sir Bhilip Sidney found much true poetry in these
eclogues, but the rustic language he could not "allow," all good
classic authorities of the pastoral condemning it. Ben Jonson,
however, said that Guarini, the Spanish pastoral dramatic writer^
" kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could."
There are two reasons for this choice by a pastoral writer of
rustic language : he may choose it either because it is more on a
level with the speakers, who are supposed to be shepherds and
shepherdesses, or because he wishes to find rare and unhackneyed
words. The latter was probably Spenser's object, if we may
judge from E. K.'s argument.
" B u t as in most exquisite
pictures they use to blaze and portray not only the dainty
lineaments of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER.

99

rude thickets and craggy clefts, that by the baseness of such
parts, more excellencie may accrue to the principal: for oftentimes we find ourselves, I know not how, singularly delighted
with the shew of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure
in disorderly order. Even so do these rough and harsh terms
enlumine and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of
brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a discord in music
maketh a comely concordance : so great delight took the worthy
poet Alceus to behold a blemish in the joint of a well-shaped
body.
"Now as touching the general purpose of his Eclogues, I
mind not to say much, himself labouring to conceal it, only this
appeareth that his unstaid youth had long wandered in the
common labyrinth of love, in which time to mitigate or allay
the heat of his passion or else to warn (as he saith) the young
shepherds, his equals and companions, of his unfortunate folly,
he compiled these 12 eclogues, which for that they be proportioned to the state of the 12 months, he termeth it Shepherd's
Calendar, applying an old name to a new work." Nobody
could be better adapted than Spenser at this time of his life
for success as a pastoral writer, the pastoral being regarded
as a purely artificial form of art. His great power was in
creating artificial worlds of fancy, and making their unnaturalness and extravagance charming.
But unfortunately in
his eclogues he followed the example of Clement Marot, the
poet of the French reformers, and he made his pastoral the
vehicle for satire on the Church and the clergy. He borrowed
from Skelton the name of Colin Clout, Colin Clout having been
made by Skelton the embodiment of opposition to the luxury
and self-seeking of ecclesiastics. Except that the pastoral was
concerned with flocks and shepherds, nothing could be more
unfit than to imbue it with such significance, its ideal being the
remoteness of its imaginary life from the life of the world.
Nothing therefore could be more artificial than the matter of the
first long poem which Spenser wrote. His satire, too, was of the
crudest kind. In the Fifth Eclogue, under the persons of two
shepherds, Piers and Palinode, he represented " 2 forms of
pastors or ministers, or the Protestant or the Catholic: whose
chief talk standeth in reasoning whether the life of the one must
be like the other; with whom having showed that it is dangerous
to maintain any fellowship or to give too much credit to their
colourable and fained good will, he telleth them a tale of the
Fox that by such a counterpoint of craftiness, deceived and

100

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

devoured the credulous kid." The merit of this eclogue is in
the telling of the story, which is done simply and clearly and
quaintly, and, together with the tale of the Oak and the Briar
in the Eclogue for February, gives testimony to the fact that
Spenser could narrate a short story, though he had not that
grander gift of narration which makes an epic poet.
But it was not the matter of The Shepherd's Calendar that
gives it such an important place in the history of poetry; it was
its manner and its style. Happily only in a few eclogues did
Spenser indulge in a vein of satire which would eventually have
landed him in a didactic strain unsuited to his genius. In the
other and more purely pastoral eclogues his style is fresh and light
and vigorous, nearly free from the affectation of the time, which
consisted either in pedantry, or in the alliteration and antithesis
and elaborations of Euphuism. The Eclogue for March, in which
two shepherds' boys, "taking occasion of the season, begin to
make purpose of love and other pleasaunce which to spring time
is most agreeable," is specially charming, written as it is in that
fresh vigorous manner which distinguished Spenser as " the new
poet." Thomalin relates how he was wounded by Cupid:—
" It was upon a holiday,
When shepherd's grooms have leave to play,
I east to go a shooting ;
Long wandring up and down the land
With bow and bolts in either hand
For birds in bushes tooting,
At length within the ivy todde
(There shrouded was the little god)
I heard a busy bustling."

The lament for the unkindness of Kosalind runs of course all
through the Calendar. Hobbinol (in the April Eclogue) complains
of " that boye's Colin Clout's great misaventure in love; whereby
his mind was alienated and withdrawn not only from him, who
most loved him, but also from all former delights and studies, as
well in pleasant piping as cunning rhyming and singing, and
other his laudable exercises." The poem closes with the Eclogue
for December, in which Colin makes his complaint to the god
Pan. In the spring of his life, he says, he was fresh and vigorous,
like that season of the year :
" Whilome in youth when flowered my joyful spring
Like swallow swift I wandered here and there;
For heat of heedless lust me so did sting
That I oft doubted danger had no fear,

CHAP. IV.]

SPENSER.

101

I went the wasteful woods and forests wide
Withouten dread of wolves to be espied.
How often have I scaled the craggy oak,
All to dislodge the raven of her nest ?
How have I wearied with many a stroke
The stately walnut tree, the while the rest
Under the tree fell all for nuts at strife,
For lief to me was liber tie and life."
B u t t h e summer of his life, his manhood, " was consumed
with great heat a n d excessive drouth, caused through "a comet or
blazing star, b y which h e meaneth love." Then lastly came his
old age, like " to winter's chill a n d frosty season."
" Winter is come that blows the bitter blast,
And after winter dreary death doth hast.
" Gather together ye my little flock,
My little flock that was to me so lief;
Let me, ah ! let me in your folds ye lock,
Ere the breme winter breed you greater grief.
Winter is come, that blows the baleful breath,
And after winter cometh timely death.
" Adieu, Delightes, that lulled me asleep ;
Adieu, my Dear, whose love I bought so dear ;
Adieu, my little Lambs and loved sheep ;
Adieu, ye Woodes, that oft my witness were ;
Adieu, good Hobbinol, that was so true,
Tell, Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu."
" S p e n s e r ' s m a t u r e h a n d , " says Mr. Lowell, " i s first seen
in t h e Muiopotmos, t h e most airily fanciful of his p o e m s — a
marvel for delicate conception a n d treatment, whose breezy verse
seems to float between a blue sky a n d golden earth in imperishable sunshine." Only Spenser could, h a v e , told so well this
story of a butterfly a n d his sad f a t e ; only Spenser could m a k e
those endless digressions concerning t h e origin of his beauty,
and of t h e ugliness of his murderer Aragnoll, without being dull
and wearisome • how Venus, jealous of her maid Astery, whom
she sent with her other maidens to gather flowers, because Cupid
" Did lend his secret aid in gathering
Into her lap the children of the spring,"
turned her into a b u t t e r f l y ;
" And all those flowers, with which so plenteously
Her lap she filled had, that bred her spite,
She placed in her wings for memory

102

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

Of her pretended crime, though crime none were :
Since which time she them in her wings doth hear."
Clarion in his b e a u t y flies to t h e " gay gardens "
" T o spoil the pleasures of that Paradise,
The wholesome saulge and lavender still grey,
Rank smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes,
The rose reigning in the Pride of May.
Cool violets and orpine growing still,
Embathed balm and cheerful galingale,
Eresh costmarie and breathful camomile,
Dull poppy and drink quick'ning setuale.
What more felicitie can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty
And to be lord of all the works of nature,
To reign in the air from th' earth to highest sky,
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye."
B u t Aragnoll, son of Arachne, " t h e most fine-fingered workwoman on ground," who h a d proudly challenged Pallas to a trial
of skill, and, being beaten, became through envy a venomous
ugly creature,
" L a y lurking covertly him to surprize."
A n d Clarion perishes, caught in meshes of which h e h a d no
suspicion as he wandered to and fro in t h e pride of his freedom.
Muiopotmos,
together with other poems by Spenser, were
published in 1 5 9 1 . A m o n g these poems are The Buines of
Time, dedicated to t h e Countess of Pembroke, a poem on t h e
death of Sir Philip Sidney, full of laments over
" T h e vain world's glory and unstedfast state.
Why then doth flesh, a bubble-glass of breath,
Hunt after honor and advancement vain,
And rear a trophy for devouring death,
With so great labor and long lasting pain,
As if his days for ever should remain ?
Sith all that in this world is great or gay
Doth as a vapour vanish or decay."
Lasting fame is only to be found in t h e poet's verses :—
" Eor deeds do die, however nobly done,
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay ;
But wise words taught in numbers for to run,
Recorded by the muses live for ay :
Nor may with stormy showers be wash't away

CHAP. IV.]

SPEJSTSEE.

103

The bitter-breathing winds with harmful blast,
Nor age nor envie shall them ever wast."
In The Tears of the Muses each of the nine laments the
neglect of her special art, and the degeneracy of the time which
has nothing to leave to fame :—
" The nurse of virtue I am hight
And golden trumpet of eternity,
That lowly thoughts lift up to heaven's height,
And mortal men have power to deify.
But now I will my golden chariot rend,
And will henceforth immortalize no more,
Sith I no more find worthie to commend
For prize of value or for learned lore."
Such is the lament of Calliope; and the whole tone of the poem
is that of a poet embittered by the neglect of true art and by
indiscriminate admiration given to what is not worthy the name
of poetry—
" Heaps of huge wTords up-hoarded hideously
With horrid sound though having little sense."
Mother HubbaraVs Tale, also included in this collection, was,
he says, in the introduction to Lady Compton, "long sithens
composed in the raw conceit of my youth." " I t is a vigorous
poem after the manner of Chaucer, showing considerable boldness in the directness of the satire." The Fox and the Ape, in the
course of their adventures, bring forward the other aspect of that
court, which, viewed as the residence of the great Gloriana, had
such brilliancy and glamour thrown over it. It is perhaps a
confirmation of the truth of Spenser's lament in The Tears of
the Muses concerning the neglect of literature, and the little
importance in which it was held, that a poem which was fierce
in its invective against the treacheries, the vain shows, the intrigues, the jealousies, and the rivalries of the court, and against
impostors who mounted to high places in the State, should
attract so little notice as to bring down upon it no censures.
The Puritan sincerity of Spenser is obvious in this poem; but
Puritans were only punished when their opinions were dangerous
to the State : such opinions Spenser never held : his religion
gave him his earnestness and sincerity, but it never led him to
desire to be a reformer in matters of creed and observance.
(Included in this collection were Virgil's " G n a t ; " " The Ruines
of Rome," by Bellay; " Visions of the World's Vanitie;" Bellay's
" Visions ; " and Petrarch's " Visions.")

104

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

That the insincerity and hollowness of court life did indeed
oppress him is abundantly testified by his poem, Colin Clout's
Come Home Againe, written on his return to Ireland in 1591.
The incongruity of the brilliant externals of the court, with its
sordid inner life, the mask of courtliness and chivalry that hid
so much that was mean and base, pained and distressed him.
But it is not in satire or in lament that Spenser excels : it is
when he frees himself from the pressure of facts, and gives his
imagination free rein, as in the Prothalamion, the Fpithalamion,
the Hymns to Love and Beauty, and in his greatest work of all,
the Faery Queen, that he is most truly himself. Then it is
that we feel Spenser's real spirit, his delicate, refined chivalry,
which was indeed a religion to him, in its worship of Beauty,
which meant to him something divine, " Beauty, the burning
lamp of heaven's light "—
" . . . through infusion of celestial power
The duller earth it quickneth with delight.
But that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray
That light proceeds
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay ;
For it is heavenly borne and cannot die,
Being a parcel of the purest sky."

And in the Epithalamion we feel the power and beauty of his
expression, of that delicate, musical verse of which he was the
master:—
'' Ah, when will this long weary day have end
And lend me leave to come unto my love ?
How slowly do the hours their numbers spend !
How slowly does sad time his feathers move !
Haste thee, 0 Fairest planet, to thy home
Within the western foam :
Thy tired steeds long since have need of rest.
Long though it be, at last I see it gloom,
And the bright evening star with golden crest
Appear out of the East."

The great work on which Spenser's fame rests had been begun
at a very early stage in the poet's career. The Faery Queen,
slighted by Gabriel Harvey, probably received a stimulus to its
completion from a conversation which took place some time after
the summer of 1584 between Spenser and certain of the principal
Englishmen employed in Irish affairs. The conversation, the
subject of which was the " ethical part" of moral philosophy, is

CHAP* IV.]

SPENSER,

105

recorded by Ludowick Bryskett, Spenser's predecessor in the
service of the Council of Munster.
In the course of the conversation Bryskett said " that he
greatly envied the happiness of the Italians, who have in their
mother-tongue late writers that have, with a singular easy
method, taught all that Plato and Aristotle have confusedly or
obscurely left written. . . . Would God that some of our
countrymen would shew themselves so well affected to the good
of their country, as to set down in English, the precepts of those
parts of moral philosophy, whereby our youth might, without
spending so much time as the learning of those other languages
require, speedily enter into the right course of virtuous life. . . ."
Then turning to Spenser he said : " It is you, Sir, to whom it
pertaineth to shew yourself courteous now unto us all and to
make us all beholding unto you for the pleasure and profit which
we shall gather from your speeches, if you shall vouchsafe to
open unto us the goodly cabinet, in which this excellent treasure
of virtues lieth locked up from the vulgar sort." . . . " I doubt
not," answered Spenser, " but with the consent of most part of
you, I shall be excused at this time of this task which would be
laid upon me : for sure I am that it is not unknown to you that
I have already undertaken a work to the same effect, which is in
heroical verse under the title of the Faery Queen to represent all
the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the
patron and defender of the same, in whose actions and feats of
arms and chivalry the operations of that virtue, whereof he is
the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly
appetites that oppose themselves against the same to be beaten
down and overcome. Which work, as I have already well entered
into, if God shall please to spare me life that I may finish it
according to my mind, your wish (Mr. Bryskett) will be in some
sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you
could desire." Thus Spenser in 1584 had already advanced
some way with his Faery Queen, and in 1590, going to England
with Baleigh, he published the first three books. In 1596 he
published three more books,= and these, with two cantos and tw^o
stanzas of a seventh book found after his death, are all that we
have of the twelve books that he contemplated writing.
In the first parcel are contained the legends of Holiness, of
Temperance, and of Chastity; in the second parcel are the
legends of Friendship, of Justice, of Courtesy. The seventh
book was probably intended to contain the legend of Constancy,
the fragments that we have of it being entitled " of Mutability."

106

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

At Kaleigh's suggestion Spenser prefixed to his poem an explanatory letter, emphasizing the object and the plan of the book.
Probably Ealeigh felt, as all Spenser's readers must, that the
point of the whole, owing to the many stories and endless digressions, was so often overwhelmed and obscured, that the reader
needed to have some clue by which to find his way about. " The
general end therefore of all the book," says Spenser, " is to fashion
a gentleman, a noble person, in virtuous and gentle discipline,
which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing,
being colored with an historical fiction,—the which the most part
of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter than for profit
of the ensample, I chose the history of King Arthur. . . . I labor
to portray in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave
knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle
hath devised. . . ." That enjoyment should be the end and aim
of a poem was so very contrary to the views of the time, that
Spenser did wisely, if he wished to gain popularity, in emphasizing the fact that his poem had a serious moral purpose—that
his were not merely
" Idle rimes,
The labor of lost time and wit unstaid ; "
but that
" If their deeper sense be only weighed,
And the dim veil, with which from common view
Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,
Perhaps not vain they may appear to you."
It was thus he attempted to propitiate Lord Burghley, who hated
him, and to whom he alludes in a less conciliatory frame of mind
at the beginning of the fourth book—
" The rugged forehead that with grave foresight
Welds kingdoms, causes, and affairs of state,
My looser rimes, I wote, doth sharply wite.
Such ones ill judge of love, that cannot love,
Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame.
. To such therefore I do not sing at all;
But to that sacred saint my sovereign queen."
Conscious that much might be found in his poem that could
not be justified by its connection with any moral purpose, he
turned for thorough appreciation to a less Puritanic audience. To
Elizabeth, who found herself flattered as much as her insatiable

SPENSER.

CHAP. IV.]

107

vanity could desire under the names of Belphcebe, Gloriana,
Cynthea, Mercilla, as
' ' The maiden queen that shone as Titan's ray,
In glistering gold and peerless precious stone,
Yet her bright blazing beauty did assay
To dim the brightness of her glorious throne,
As envying herself that too exceeding shone,"

he dedicated his great work " t o live with the eternitie of
her fame." " The claim was a proud one," says Mr. Church,
" but it has proved a prophecy." The Faery Queen will rank
always among the great poems of English literature. And it does
this, not because of its allegory, not because of its obscure moral
purpose, but because of the interest and charm of its imaginary
world, and, above all, because of its perfect, delicate, and harmonious verse. Spenser's allegory or "dark conceit" might
well indeed have been omitted. It is fairly clear in the first
three books; in the first book he is quite successful in keeping
the episodes in subordination to the general plan. Una, the
Truth, followed by her lion, innocent and pure, and strong in her
single-heartedness to tame wild beasts and " salvage nations," is
the object of the Red Cross Knight. Most of his adventures are
significant: his defection through the wiles of Duessa, who
counterfeits the appearance of Truth; his resistance to the
temptations of Despair—
" Then do no further go, no further stray,
But here lie down, and to thy rest betake,
Th' ill to prevent, that life ensewen may.
The longer life, I wote the greater sin ;
The greater sin, the greater punishment; "

his purification in the House of Holiness—
11

And bitter penance with an iron whip
Was wont him once to disple every day,
And sharp remorse his heart did prick and nip,
That drops of blood thence like a well did play,
And sad repentance used to embay
His body in salt water smarting sore ; "

and lastly comes the less difficult because more open struggle
with the wicked Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon. Thus he saves
the Truth, and becomes united to her for life.
In the second book Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, fights
with the personifications of the evil passions that beset the soul

108

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

of man : he binds F u r y ; he resists immodest Mirth; he is led
down by Mammon to see his secret store—on the way he passes
" Cruel Revenge and rancorous Despight,
Disloyal Treason and heartburning Hate ;
But gnawing Jealousy, out of their sight,
Sitting alone, his bitter lips did bite."

He resists the temptations of Acrasia in the bower of Bliss.
This is the last and greatest of his temptations. Spenser
describes, with all the power and skill of his beauty-loving
mind, that world of delight and luxury, — " t h e most dainty
paradise on ground."
" Goodly beautified,
"With all the ornaments of Flora's pride,
Wherewith her mother Art, as half in scorn
Of niggard nature, like a pompous bride,
Did deck her."

The third book has somewhat the same moral as the second;
but Britomart instead of Guyon fights the battle of purity—
"Lifting up her brave heroic thought
'Bove woman's weakness."
Already in the second book Spenser shows a tendency to interrupt the thread of the story with digressions. In Canto X. he
gives a chronicle of British kings. In the third book he begins
to lose not only the thread of the allegory, but the thread of the
story; and in the fourth, fifth, and sixth books he seems to lose
sight of the moral purpose altogether. But although this may
have appeared as a defect to Spenser's generation, it by no means
lessens the value of the Faery Queen in the eyes of posterity. It
was impossible for a mind like Spenser's to give unity and continuity to a long poem of this kind, even with the help of
allegory, for the allegory had not really taken hold of him : he
regarded it as an appendage.
To a later Puritan—Bunyan—the order of the moral world
was all imaged forth with the clearness of strong moral vision :
he saw it in everything that he contemplated, and thus to the
story of the soul's pilgrimage everything is subordinate. But
to Spenser the details of his imaginary world were infinitely
interesting and absorbing: he forgot that he had to follow the
struggles of the human soul; his allegory is often a difficulty.
" Perhaps," says Mr. Lowell, " he adopted it only for the reason
that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his run0, not
because it was becoming but because it was the wear." Certain

CHAP, IV.]

SPENSER.

109

it is that as we read further and further in the Faery Queen we
find it falling more and more into the background, almost forgotten in the wonderful sights and adventures of Fairyland.
As the poem advances the story is still further troubled
by definite political allusions. Philip of Spain appears as the
son of Geryon, as the Soldan, as Grantorto. Sir Bourbon, " i n
dangerous distress of a rude rout," is Henry of Navarre, kept
from his throne because a Protestant. The trial of Duessa is so
distinctly the trial of Mary Queen of Scots that James VI,
thought it due to his royal dignity to notice these allusions to
his mother, resenting that she should be represented by " Duessa,
daughter of deceit and shame." That Artegall is Lord Grey de
Wilton and Sir Calidore Sir Philip Sidney there can be little
doubt. The idea of the Knight of Justice, who unswervingly
followed what he thought to be his duty, to whom nothing was
so sacred as his plighted word, displaced for a time in Spenser's
imagination the ideal of the courtly chivalrous Sidney. His experience in Ireland had taught him the effectiveness and the
value of the qualities of firmness and valour.
*' Dearer is love than Life, and fame than gold,
But dearer than them both your faith once plighted hold."
It is the Knight of Justice whose struggles are hardest and
least rewarded : it is his reputation that is torn to pieces by the
hags Envy and Detraction, who urge on the Blatant Beast;
but it is the Knight of Courtesy who leads captive the Blatant
Beast and silences his venomous tongues. The so-called Justice
that Lord Grey had dealt out to the Irish had, as Spenser
thought, been cruelly misrepresented, and Lord Grey himself
unjustly treated. His fame had been blasted by the Blatant
Beast and his attendant hags.
But it is neither the allegory nor the political allusions, nor
even the story, that make the great charm of the Faery Queen.
The interest of the story is that rather absorbing yet comparatively vulgar interest which the modern world finds in the
Arabian Nights' Tales, and which the feudal world found in the
chivalrous romances; it is the interest that comes from following
strange adventure, the fortunes of brave and beautiful persons,
with their changing surroundings—-at one time gorgeous glittering
palaces, at another gloomy and horrible dungeons : all this, without any search for deeper significance, suffices to afford interest of
a certain kind. We are interested in golden-haired Britomart,
who, looking one day into Merlin's mirror, saw the vision of a

110

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

knight, so splendid and so great, that her peace was henceforward
troubled by love for him, and she set out to seek him. We are
interested in the " Salvage Man, matched with the lady fair," who
walk together for a short time through fairyland • in " Pastorella,"
brought up a shepherd maid, who is carried off by brigands,
who eventually is rescued and carried to the castle of a lord and
lady, who prove to be her father and mother. But far greater
than the interest of the story, which, after all, is told after the manner of chivalrous romances, and is full of monotonous incidents,
hopelessly wanting in unity, with numberless digressions, is the
varied charm of the verse. Spenser, in describing the sights and
sounds of his fairyland, makes us realise his little world, because
his language and his verse are full of the feeling and colour of
his thought. He makes us feel how beautiful was Belphcebe,
the virgin of spotless fame—
"Upon her eyelids many graces sat
Under the shadow of her even brows.
Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire
About her shoulders weren loosely shed,
And when the wind amongst them did inspire
They waved like a pennon wide dispred,
And low behind her back were scattered ;
And whether Art it were or heedless hap,
As through the flowering forest rash she fled,
In her rude heares sweet flowers themselves did lap,
And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap."

We see Britomart taking off her helmet, her golden hair falling
around her—
'' Which doft, her golden locks, which were upbound
Still in a knot, unto her heels down-traced,
And like a silken veil in compass round
About her back and all her body wound ;
Like as the shining sky in summer's night,
What time the days with scorching heat abound,
Is creasted all with lines of fiery light."

He takes us to the palace of Morpheus—
'' And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down.
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft;
Mist with a murmuring wind, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swTowne.
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,
As still are wont to annoy the walled town,
Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies ; "

SPENSER.

CHAP. IV.]

Ill

to t h e bower of bliss—
" The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet;
Th' angelical soft trembling voices made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the waters fall;
The waters fall with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call,
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."
Then, too, h e makes real t h e horrors of t h e dark regions below
t h e earth : he follows Duessa and N i g h t to hell—
" To the black shadows of the Stgyian shore,
Where wretched ghosts sit wailing evermore."
H e goes with Mammon past the river Cocytus,
" I n which full many souls do endless wail and weep ; "
and, looking down,
li
saw many damned wights
In those sad waves, which direful deadly stanke,
Plonged continuelly of cruel sprights ;
That with their piteous cries and yelling shrightes
They made the further shore resounden wide."

H e sees T a n t a l u s —
"Deep was he drenched to the upmost chin,
Yet gaped still as coveting to drink
Of the cold liquor which he waded in.
And, stretching forth his hand, did often think
To reach the fruit which grew upon the brink ;
But both the fruit from hand and flood from mouth
Did fly aback, and made him vainly swinck ;
The whiles he sterv'd with hunger and with drouth ;
He daily died, yet never throughly dyen couth."
I n t h e Faery Queen we do not alone feel the poetic power
and varied sensitiveness of Spenser's n a t u r e ; we are always continually reminded of his noble and spiritual longings, of his
admiration for w h a t was morally beautiful and pure : his was a
spirit " finely touched," uniting t h e worship of beauty, t h a t belonged to t h e men of t h e Renaissance, to t h e worship of moral
excellence, which belongs to t h e P u r i t a n race. The worship of
love and- b e a u t y was t h e inspiration of all t h a t was best in

life—
"To the highest and the worthiest
Lifteth it up."

112

SPENSER.

[CHAP. IV.

He longs for the " antique world," as he pictured it to himself,
" "Where good was only for itself desired."

Sir Guyon, Sir Calidore, Sir Artegall, are no mere knights
of chivalry: no writer of mere chivalrous romance could have
imagined them: in their struggle after what was best and worthiest
in life, exposed powerfully to the temptations that beset the
finely-organised spirit, sensitive to beauty and joy of all kinds,
Spenser reveals himself a child both of the New and Old World,
whose soul was full of the spiritual purity of the Middle Age,
but illumined by the glow and colour of the time of Renaissance,
with its admiration of all that was human and beautiful.
His great work marks the coming of a new era, while it recalls the last: the different currents of two eras are harmonised
by his genius. r" A beauty issues from this harmony," says M.
Taine,—" the beauty in the poet's heart which his whole work
strives to express; a noble and yet a laughing beauty, made up
of moral elevation and sensuous seductions, English in sentiment,
Italian in externals, chivalric in its subject, modern in its perfection, representing a unique and admirable epoch, the appearance of Paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form
by an imagination of the North."

CHAPTEE V.
ELIZABETHAN AET—POETRY.

MARLOWE, Christopher, b. 1564, d. 1593.—Hero and Leander was left
unfinished at Marlowe's death; Chapman completed it, dividing
Marlowe's fragment into two parts, which now form the first two
sestiads of the poem "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,"
printed complete in England's Helicon, 1600.
SHAKSPERE, William, b. 1564, d. 1616. — Venus and Adonis, 1592?
Rape of Lucrece, 1593-94 ? Sonnets, 1595-1605 ?
LYLY, John, b. 1554, d. 1606 ; BARNFIELD, 1574-1627 ; LODGE, Thomas,

b. 1556, prob. d. 1625 ; GREENE, Robert, prob. 1560-1592; DANIEL,
Samuel, 1562-1619; DRUMMOND, William, 1585-1649; PEELE,
George, prob. b. 1558, died before 1598 ; WARNER, William, b. 1550,
d. 1609 ; DRAYTON, Michael, about 1563-1631 ; DYER, Sir Edward,
about 1550-1607; WOTTON, Sir Henry, 1568-1639; RALEIGH, Sir
Walter, 1552-1618; GREVILLE, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628;
DA VIES, Sir John, d. 1625.

THE English mind having passed through its period of training
and discipline—the example of the Italians, both in prose and in
verse, having done its work in encouraging the study and cultivation of style—genius now broke through the rules which had
tended to confine it and make it artificial, and art began to be
the free spontaneous expression of the national mind. Dramatic
art was of course the great product of this period, both because
it was essentially the nature of the English genius to be as dramatic in art as it was philosophic in thought, and also because
the sense of national unity, the consciousness of being a great
people, demanded such artistic expression as can be found only
in the drama or in architecture. But side by side with dramatic
art was produced a vast body of poetry. This poetry Mr. Stopford Brooke divides into three divisions, each corresponding to
phases in the growth of the Elizabethan mind. The first division
contains love poetry and sonnets, and is the fit expression of the
ardent, eager youth of the period; the second contains patriotic
poems—poems expressing keen interest in the historic past of
I

114

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

England, and in its national present and future, marking that
maturer period of growth when the interests of life widen, and
the personal ones are not all-absorbing; thirdly and lastly, come
the philosophic poems, expressing the thoughts of the reflective
old age of the period, when the keen enjoyment in life had
passed away.
The first division is the largest: almost all the most celebrated
dramatists wrote love poems and lyrics; indeed, they looked to
them to be the monuments of their fame. Shakspere, in common with his 'contemporaries, grounded his literary fame on
his Venus and Adonis, and on his Lucrece; Marlowe on his
Hero and Leander, The drama was not then definitely considered a branch of art. Originality was so little considered in
play-writing, so much of it being the revision of old plays and
the adaptation of stories into plays, that it was esteemed merely
a matter of business, and writers undertook it as being a remunerative profession, and trusted for fame to their sonnets and love
poems. The same stigma attached to dramatists at the beginning of this period as, in still earlier days, was attached to the
writers of poetry. Puttenham in his Art of Poetry says : " Now
also of such among the nobilitie and gentry as be very well seen
in many laudable sciences, and especially in making or Poesie, it
is so come to pass that they have no courage to write, and if
they have yet are they loath to be a knowen of their skill. So
as I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have
written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered
it to be published without their names to i t : as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned and to show himself amorous of any good Art." Probably Sir Philip Sidney, Surrey, and
Wyatt, who thought far more of their art than their nobility, did
for the social reputation of art what Jonson, by his high moral
aims, and Beaumont, by his attachment to it from a quite
unprofessional point of view, did subsequently for the drama.
Thus, even in this, the most unconventional and freest age of
English life, did mistaken ideas drive talent to a false sphere,
till its instincts becoming stronger, proved too much for convention.
Shakspere thus first recommended himself to his age as the
author of two rather frigid love poems, Venus and Adonis and
Lucrece, and by certain "sugared sonnets." His reputation
among dramatists was that of " a n upstart crow, beautified by our
feathers," this being the opinion that his talent in revision and
adaptation called forth. Hazlett says these two poems are like

CHAP. V.]

POETRY,

115

constructions of ice, "hard, glittering, and cold." They are
indeed but the "first heirs" of Shakspere's invention; and as
the last and best gift that comes to an artist in whatever sphere
is simplicity and naturalness, it is unjust to expect in these love
poems more than faint suggestions of the power of that geniuswhich was so long in reaching the height of its complex development. Coleridge considers the delight in sweetness and richness
of sound that Shakspere shows in the poem of Venus and Adonis
" a highly favorable promise in the compositions of a young
man." But other critics find in the harmony of his verse, and
the glow of his colouring, only successful obedience to the conventional art of his day. Nothing in this poem seems to suggest
the Shakspere that we know, unless it be the concluding verses,—
the prophecy of Venus over the dead body of Adonis,—more alive
with meaning, and therefore more impressive, than the cold verse
in which Shakspere endeavoured to tell the classical story, for
which he had evidently little feeling.
" Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy,
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend :
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end ;
Ne'er settled equally, but high or low ;
That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.
" It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud ;
Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while ;
The bottom poison, and the top o'erstrawed
With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile,
The strongest body shall it make most weak,
Strike the wise dumb, and teach the fool to speak.
" It shall be sparing, and too full of riot,
Teaching decrepit age to tread the measure ;
The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,
Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasure ;
It shall be raging-mad, and silly-mild,
Make the young old, the old become a child.
'' It shall suspect where is no cause of fear ;
It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;
It shall be merciful, and too severe,
And most deceiving when it seems most just;
Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,
Put fear to valour, courage to the coward."

In Lucrece there is still more of the sterner and more reflective
element, sometimes very much out of place: " Lucrece in her
agony delivers tirades on night, on time, on opportunity." In

116

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

this poem, as in that of Venus and Adonis, one feels that the
subj ect is foreign to the mind that is employed upon it. Although,
as Prof. Dowden says, " t h e poet's pleasurable excitement can
be perceived : nay, at times we feel the energetic fervour of his
heart," yet there is no evidence from the spirit of the poem that
Shakspere's genius ever really found itself at home in it. Fashion
evidently dictated his choice of subject: he only satisfies his
instinct for noting the significance of things by stopping occasionally to reflect. He describes the grief of Lucrece : sometimes
" 'tis dumb and hath no words," " sometimes 'tis mad and too
much talk affords."
" The little birds that tune their morning's joy,
Make her moans mad with their sweet melody :
For mirth doth search the bottom of annoy ;
Sad souls are slain in merry company ;
Grief best is pleased with grief's society :
True sorrow then is feelingly sufficed,
When with like semblance it is sympathised."
Much more beautiful, much more perfect as a work of art, is
the part that Marlowe contributed to Hero and Leander. Marlowe's genius was essentially pagan and sensuous, and suited to
the classic tales he versified : he shows in them " nothing of the
deeper thought of the t i m e ; " no tendency to " look before and
after;" no worship of a Gloriana or hostility to an Acrasia interferes with his frank acceptance of sensuous beauty and joy. . . .
Marlowe's power does not lie in catching in the aspect of objects
or scenes those deeper suggestions which appeal to an imagination stored with human experience as well as sensitive to colour
and form, . . . his soul seems to be in his eyes : and he renders
the beauty which appeals directly to sense as vividly as he
apprehends."
Very characteristic of the spirit of the whole poem is that
one line, which, quoted by Shakspere in i s You Like It, constitutes all that is commonly known of Hero and Leander—
"Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight."
Hero is seen by Leander sacrificing in the Temple of Venus—
"Stone-still he stood, and evermore he gaz'd.
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
let it suffice,
What we behold is censur'd by our eyes ;
Where both deliberate the love is slight:
Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight."

CHAP. V.]

POETRY.

117

It is true, indeed, that in this poem Marlowe's soul is in his
eyes. He sees nothing more than meets the eye, but he sees
that very beautifully and very vividly : and he has succeeded in
writing verse which none of his great contemporaries could ever
equal,—narrative verse which has a music so spontaneous and
rich that, as Mr. Bradley says, Marlowe might have applied to
it his own words—
" That calls my soul from forth his living seat
To move unto the measures of delight."
He has the power of what is called pictorial writing.
and Leander stand mute before each other :—

Hero

"Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled,
The air with sparks of living fire was spangl'd,
And night deep-drench'd in misty Acheron
Heav'd up her head, and half the world upon
Breath'd darkness forth."
Hero tells Leander where she lives—
"Far from the town (where all is whist and still,
Save that the sea playing on yellow sand
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land,
Whose sounds allure the golden Morpheus
In silence of the night to visit us)
My turret stands."
And Marlowe thus describes Leander's death—
" The waves about him wound,
And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground
Was strew'd with pearls, and in low coral groves
Sweet-singing mermaids sported with their loves
In heaps of heavy gold."
Long love poems, such as those of Spenser, Marlowe, and
Shakspere, were not plentiful in these days, but the age was
prolific in lyrics and sonnets. Collections were formed by enterprising booksellers of the occasional verse of most of the poets of
the day. Poems mostly didactic and religious are collected in
the Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576. A gorgeous Gallery of
Gallant Inventions, by Proctor, 1578; A Handful of Pleasant
Delights, by Clement Eobinson, 1584 ; and many more,—are all
collections of fashionable songs and poems. But among the
most interesting are The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, containing
writings of Shakspere, Barnfield, Marlowe, Kaleigh, and others;
England's Helicon, containing poems of Spenser, Sidney, Brooke,

118

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

Greene, Lodge, Marlowe; and A Poetical Rhapsody, 1602, edited
by Francis Hanson, who himself contributed many poems. Lyly,
Greene, Lodge, Shakspere, Daniel, Drummond, and especially
the later dramatists, all made themselves known as writers of
lyrics; indeed it would have been as well for Lyly's reputation if
he had confined himself to this sphere: he is a standing proof,
says Mr. Ward, of how impossible it is for an author of merely
lyrical power to write a drama. It may be thought that the
verse of Lyly and Lodge, and especially that of Lyly, they
being known above all as Euphuists, should be placed among that
of the more conventional and artificial writers who heralded the
most glorious period of Elizabethan activity* But although they
both moved within the sphere of Euphuism, there is a freshness
and vigour about their verse which shows them to have kinship
with that freer burst of artistic life which succeeded the period
devoted to study of form. If their love songs are obedient to
the form of the earlier period they have the tone of the later.
Lyly is best known by the lyric in Alexander and Campaspe.
It is the song of Apelles, who is the rival of Alexander for the
love of Campaspe, the Theban slave—
'' Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses—Cupid paid.
He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows,
His mother's doves and teams of sparrows,
Loses them too, then down he throws
The coral of his lip, the rose
Growing on's cheek (but none knows how) ;
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin—
All these did my Campaspe win ;
At last he set her both his eyes :
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
0 Love, has she done this to thee,
What shall, alas ! become of me ? "

Lodge surpassed even the master of degenerate Euphuism in
his pastoral of Rosalynde, and he wrote various little songs and
lyrics which prove him to have had real brilliancy and power in
versifying, and very little of the Euphuistic languor and feebleness, though naturally, being a professed Euphuist, his choice of
subjects and his manner of treating them was limited. His
poetry has a vigour about it which is wanting to his prose productions. "As a satirist," says Mr. Gosse, " h e is weak and
tame; as a dramatist he is wholly without skill; as a writer of
romances he is charming, but thoroughly artificial." Much

CHAP. V.]

POETKY,

119

fresher and freer and unconventional are t h e lyrics of Greene.
" Lodge," says Mr. Gosse, " w a s t h e least boisterous of t h a t noisy
group of learned wits who, with Greene a n d Marlowe a t their
head, invaded London from t h e universities during t h e close of
Elizabeth's reign."
H e h a d certainly less of t h a t excessive
vitality which Greene and Marlowe found it so h a r d to control,
and which landed them in a wild a n d dissipated life, to whose
general degradation a n d misery t h e whole tone of their poetry
seems so opposed. " Greene was imaginatively one of t h e purest
of idyllic dreamers . . . there was an absolute chasm between t h e
foulness of his life and t h e serenity of his intellect." The sweetness and freshness of his blank verse, t h e way in which he could
colour a story and give it an atmosphere, give h i m claim to r a n k
as one of t h e greatest of Shakspere's predecessors; and as a
writer of lyrics h e bears comparison with Marlowe as one of t h e
freshest, most harmonious, and least artificial. H i s verse corresponds to the t r i u m p h of Doron as he glorifies Samela—
" Like to Diana in her summer weed,
Girt with a crimson robe of brightest dye,
Goes fair Samela.
Whiter than be the flocks that straggling feed
When washed by Arethusa faint they lie,
Is fair Samela.
As fair Aurora in her morning grey,
Decked with the ruddy glister of her love,
Is fair Samela.
Like lovely Thetis on a calm day,
When as her brightness Neptune's fancy move,
Is fair Samela."
I t lends itself to t h e pleading tone of Fawnia's lover—
" Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,
Or but as mild as she is seeming so,
Then were my hopes greater than my despair ;
Then all the world were heaven, nothing woe.
Ah, were her heart relenting as her hand,
That seems to melt even with the mildest touch,
Then knew I where to seat me in a land
Under wide heavens, but yet (I know) not such."
Marlowe's lyrical power is abundantly proved by the wellknown pastoral s o n g :
" Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or steepy mountains yield."

120

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

Shakspere's " Silvia " in the Two Gentlemen of Verona—
"Who is Silvia ! what is she
That all our swains commend her ?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her
That she might admired be;"
the sea-dirge in the Tempest—
" Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made ;"
—are but two instances among many of his power of writing
songs and lyrics.
It was, however, the writers belonging to the declining drama
that were above all fertile in lyrics. In proportion as dramatic
power declined, and the real idea of the drama ceased to exercise
influence, the lyrical power—the power of giving forcible expression to transitory moods and feelings—seemed to grow. Perhaps
this was natural in that time of exaggerated feeling which came
at the end of the Elizabethan period, when the emotional nature
was kept in no check by an attempt to express it in conventional
form,—when all that nobler stimulus to self-control, which came
from attachment to great and high interests, had vanished,
—when the excitable and passionate Elizabethan natures gave
themselves up unrestrainedly to the feeling of the moment.
Among the most charming and most musical lyrics that were
ever written are those of Fletcher. The Faithful Shepherdess is
simply made up of them : and in many of his other plays—plays
which are often sordid in plot and in characterisation—there
are scattered songs charming in their freshness and grace. For
instance, the song in the Woman-Hater—1
" Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delights awhile,
Let some pleasing dreams beguile
All my fancies : that from thence
I may feel an influence,
All my powers of care bereaving.
'' Tho' but a shadow, but a sliding
Let me know some little joy,
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought:
0 let my joys have some abiding ;"
This play may have been written in conjunction with Beaumont.

GHAP. V.]

POETRY.

121

and the spirited song from Valentiman—
" Hear, ye ladies that despise,
"What the mighty Love has done, ;
Fear examples and be wise :
Fair Calista was a nun ;
Leda sailing on the stream
To deceive the hopes of man,
Love accounting but a dream
Doated on a silver swan ;
Danae, in a brazen tower,
Where no love was, loved a shower.
" Hear, ye ladies that are coy
What the mighty Love can do,
Fear the fierceness of the boy :
The chaste moon he made to woo ;
Yesta, kindling holy fires
Circled round about with spies
Never dreaming loose desires
Doting at the altar dies ;
Ilion, in a short hour, higher
He can build, and once more fire."

This period of brilliant art also favoured and developed the
sonnet. Daniel and Drummond and Shakspere took away from
this form of poetry the artificiality of feeling in which it had been
born and nourished. It became no longer the expression of
conventional emotion : Shakspere's first sonnets are the expression of devoted and deep friendship, and his last sonnets are
dedicated to a pale, dark-eyed woman, who was the reverse of
beautiful, according to the conventional ideas of beauty,—one
whom it would have been impossible to address after the ordinary
manner of sonnet-writers. Most of Drummond's sonnets were
written to the memory of the woman he loved—Mary Cunningham, who died on the eve of their wedding. Others of his, like
Shakspere's, are the expressions of true friendship, dedicated by
him to Sir William Alexander. Daniel's sonnets to Delia stand
midway between the conventional sonnet dictated by conventional
emotion and the sonnets which were the expression of true
feeling. The inspiration given by Delia, although she may have
been only a half-real person, was sound. Daniel had, like
Sidney, " looked in his heart and written "—
" Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night,
Brother to death, in silent darkness born :
Relieve my languish and restore the light ;
With dark forgetting of my care ; return
And let the day be time enough to mourn

122

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

The ship-wreck of my ill-adventur'd youth :
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn
"Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease dreams, the images of day-desires
To model forth the passions of the morrow ;
Never let rising sun approve you liars
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow,
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain
And never wake to feel the day's disdain."

Drummond's sonnets are all tinged with that melancholy which
clouded his life long after the death of Mary Cunningham—
'' Thou window, once which served for a sphere
To that dear planet of my heart, whose light
Made often blush the glorious queen of night
While she in thee more beauteous did appear,
"What mourning weeds, alas ! now dost thou wear ?
How loathsome to mine eyes is thy sad sight ?
How poorly look'st thou, with what heavy cheer
Since that sun set, which made thee shine so bright ?
Unhappy now thee close, for as of late
To wond'ring eyes thou wast a paradise,
Bereft of her who made thee fortunate,
A gulf thou art, whence clouds of sighs arise ;
But unto none so noisome as to me,
Who hourly see my murder'd joys in thee."

Shakspere's sonnets, which, like most Elizabethan sonnets,
disregard strict form, are interesting not only because among
them are some of the best of Elizabethan sonnets, though all of
them by no means do credit to their great author; but also
because they are the one autobiographical record that we have
of the great dramatist. We gather from them that Shakspere
was devoted to a friend who was for many years everything to
him. This theory has not been destroyed by that ingenious
German commentator who, endeavouring to solve the mystery
of Mr. W. H., to whom the sonnets are written, and whose personality has never been clearly identified, suggested that Shakspere had written them to himself—that Mr. W. H. meant Mr.
William Himself. " T h e sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in
mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspere," says Meres, in his
Palladis Tamia, when he mentions " these sugared sonnets that
Shakspere wrote to his private friends." The first 126 of these
sonnets are addressed to " Will," and the difficulty is to discover
who this " Will" is,—" the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,
Mr. W. H." Some suppose that it is Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton; others that it is William Herbert, Earl of Pern-

POETRY.

CHAP. V.]

123

b r o k e ; b u t of t h e identity of either of these two persons w i t h
Mr. W. H . there can be no certainty. This first division of t h e
sonnets can be divided into various groups-—the first group extending from I . to X X X I I . T h e sonnets in this group are
addressed to this unknown friend, who is beautiful and brilliant,
and express deep devoted friendship which nothing has as yet
troubled—
XVII.
" If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, l This poet lies.' "
XVIII.
" Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ? '
Thou art more lovely and more temperate."
I n Sonnet X I X . he asks Time to be k i n d to t h e face of his friend—
'' And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets,
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime :
0, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen."
To think only of his friend is satisfaction enough—
" "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, all sorrows end."
Sonnets X X X I I I . to X L I I . express Shakspere's admiration for
his friend—an admiration still deep, b u t now troubled b y absence,
and later b y a fault he has committed :
{

XXXIX.
' 0 Absence, what a torment wouldst thou prove,
Were it not that sour leisure gave sweet leave
To entertain the time with thoughts of love."

H e forgives him for w h a t he has d o n e —
XXXV.
" No more be grieved at that which thou hast done ;
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud ;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun."

124

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

XL.
" And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury."
Sonnets XLII.-LXXIY. are to the same friend during a second
absence—
L.
" My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
They express repeatedly the fear of Time—
LXIV.
" When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age ;
When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage ;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,—
That time will come and take my life away."
LX.
" Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end."
But Time shall not destroy the best of human feelings—
CIY.
" To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were, when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still."
CXXIII.
" N o , Time thou shalt not boast that I do change."
CXVI.
" Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his binding sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
Perhaps the two most beautiful sonnets of the whole series,
certainly the most beautiful as far as thought goes, are at the
end of this group—Sonnets LXI. and LXYL—
LXI.
" Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night ?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight ?

CHAP. V.]

POETRY.

125

Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry ;
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy ?
0 no ! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake ;
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake :
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near."
LXVI.
'' Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

Sonnets from LXY. to XCYI. are troubled with thoughts of a
rival in the friendship of W. H. : some suppose him to be
Marlowe, from Sonnet LXXXYI.—
" Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
1 was not sick of any fear from thence :
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter ; that enfeebled mine."

In Sonnet LXXXYII. he seems to renounce him altogether—
" Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing ;"
but again, from Sonnets X C Y I I . to X C I X . , he shows himself to
have returned to his allegiance : he grieves over his third separation from h i m —
XCYII.
" How like a winter hath my absence been,
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year !
"What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen !
"What old December's bareness everywhere ! "

Sonnets C. to CXXYI. are written after a long pause, but
express undiminished friendship—

ELIZABETHAN ART.

126

[CHAP. V.

C.

' * Where art thou, muse, that thou forget'st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might ?"
Sonnets from CXXVI. to CXLVIII. are addresses to the pale
dark-eyed lady who was so much the reverse of beautiful that
some have supposed that Shakspere in writing them meant to
parody the ordinary sonnet of his day. But although he does
not seem to have thought her even beautiful or good, there is a
genuine feeling animating the sonnets which sufficiently proves
that they had a real object—
CXXX.
c
' My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red :
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."
CXLVIII.
' 0 cunning Love ! with tears thou keep'st me blind,
Lest eyes, well-seeing, thy foul faults should find."

i

Shakspere's sonnets, though by no means characterised by
that rare power shown in his dramatic work, yet make an epoch
in sonnet-writing. He was the first to make the sonnet the
expression of deep sincere feeling, first for a friend, and then for
the lady who had captivated him by no conventional charms,
but by a power which called forth feelings perhaps not of the
best kind, but certainly of a strong kind. And also these
sonnets are full of a really spontaneous and unconventional
spirit of devotion, which suffices for itself, and is happy without
return—
"For I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe."
It characterises the best of his sonnets, gives us a little insight
into the great and magnanimous soul of the dramatist, whose
personality is so hidden behind his creations.
This period of the Elizabethan age, when men were not only
alive to their own personal needs, and interested merely in their
personal lives, but also in their great national life, is distinguished
by the first effective development of patriotic and historic literature. The historical plays of Shakspere, of Chapman, and later
of Ford, show the direction of the stimulus which had been

CHAP. V.]

POETRY.

127

given to drama by the sense of a great national destiny, and of
a glorious national present and future. Laurence Minot had
celebrated in his patriotic but archaic verse the battles of
Edward III. Quite as stimulating to national enthusiasm were
the great wars in which England was engaged at this time,—
wars which were really undertaken for the independence and
free national life of England against a king of Spain who was
not only the champion of despotism, but the ally of the Papacy.
Peele, when he wrote his verses of farewell to Sir John Norris
and Sir Francis Drake, two of England's naval heroes at this
time, was animated by a real and stirring spirit of patriotism,
and the crisis at which he wrote rather excuses the somewhat
excited language in which he speaks of the " matchless English
virtue."
'' Have done with care, my hearts ! abroad amain,
With stretching sails to plough the swelling waves,
Bid England's shore and Albion's chalky cliffs
Farewell! bid stately Troynovant adieu,
Where pleasant Thames from Isis silver head
Begins her quiet glide, and runs along
To that brave bridge, the bar that thwarts her course,
Near neighbour to the ancient stony tower,
The glorious hold that Julius Csesar built.
Change love for arms ; girt to your blades, my boys !
Your rests and muskets take ; take helm and targe,
And let god Mars his consort make you mirth.
You follow Drake, by sea the scourge of Spain,
The dreadful dragon, terror to your foes,
Victorious in his return from Ind,
In all his high attempts unvanquished.
You follow noble Norris, whose renown,
Won in the fertile fields of Belgia,
Spreads by the gates of Europe to the courts
Of Christian kings and heathen potentates.
You fight for Christ and England's peerless queen,
Elizabeth, the wonder of the world,
Over whose throne the enemies of God
Have thundered erst their vain successless braves."

The poetry of Warner shows that pride in the past of the
English which patriotism and a belief in its Future had
stimulated, but it shows little more. He composed a tedious
poem called Albion's England, a history of England from the
Deluge to the time of Elizabeth; " but," says Mr. Saintsbury,
" in spite of the singularity of its plan, and the vigorous touches

128

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP, v,

scattered here and there, it will not allow him to be compared to
even the second rate Elizabethans,—certainly not with his fellow
historians, Drayton and Daniel." Drayton, without doubt the
greatest of the historic poets of the age, is known by the Civil
Wars of Edward II. and Barons ; England's Heroical Epistles ;
and the Polyolbion, a descriptive poem of Britain in 30,000 lines,
mixed with stories and antiquarian facts, all digested into a
so-called poem. But the patriotic spirit, apart from patriotic
motive, is best seen in his ballad on The Battle of Agincourt:—
" Fair stood the wind for France,
When we our sails advance,
Nor now to prove our chance
Longer will tarry ;
But putting to the main,
At Caux, the mouth of Seine,
With all his martial train
Landed King Harry.
" And turning to his men,
Quoth our brave Henry then,
' Though they to one be ten
Be not amazed ;
Yet have we well begun,
Battles so bravely won
Have ever to the sun
By fame been raised.
' And for myself (quoth he),
This my full rest shall be,
England ne'er mourn for me,
Nor more esteem me.
Victor I will remain,
Or on this earth lie slain ;
Never shall she sustain
Loss to redeem me.'
' They now to fight are gone,
Armour on armour shone,
Drum now to drum did groan,
To hear was wonder ;
That with the cries they make
The very earth did shake,
Trumpet to trumpet spake,
Thunder to thunder.
' Well it thine age became,
0 noble Erpingham,
Which didst the signal aim
To our hid forces ;

CHAP. V.]

POETEY.

129

"When from a meadow by,
Like a storm suddenly,
The English archery
Stuck the French horses.
" Warwick in blood did wade,
Oxford the foe invade,
And cruel slaughter made,
Still as they ran up ;
Suffolk his axe did ply,
Beaumont and Willoughby
Bare them right doughtily,
Ferrers and Fanhope.
"Upon St. Crispin's day
Fought was this noble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry.
0 when shall English men
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Henry 1"

Daniel, who is known also by his charming and carefullyconstructed sonnets to Delia, claims a rank among the patriotic
and historic poets of his time by his poem on the Civil Wars.
" But," says Mr. Saintsbury, " there can be no doubt, however,
that his choice of historical subjects for his poetry was unfortunate for his fame. His one qualification for the task was his
power of dignified moral reflection, in which he has hardly a
-superior." Probably Chapman, in his historical drama, especially
in Bussy d'Amhois, and the Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, may lay
claim to being his equal in weight and fulness of moral reflection.
But this power, it is well known, does not make a poet; indeed,
too greatly developed, it tends rather to unmake one. Daniel
has not Chapman's gift of fine dignified verse; he has not
attempted to seize the spirit of the historic period with which he
busies himself; he lacks the faculty of narrative: the result is,
as Mr. Saintsbury says, " that The History of the Civil Wars is
with difficulty readable."
The third great phase of this period is represented by philosophical poetry, which marks the maturer and more reflective
aspect of the Elizabethan mind,—poetry which is animated by
a certain gloomy and sometimes by a morbid spirit, which finds
no satisfaction in life for its faculties, and so exercises them in
philosophy. This literature is sad; it marks a depressing epoch;
it is indeed worth notice, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, as an
K

130

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

indication of that thinking spirit which was to produce Hobbes,
Harrington, and Locke; but it marks the end of the glowing
enthusiasm that coloured all things in earlier times and infused
them with life. The ideal glamour which the art of former poets
had thrown over life is to these poets but an illusion. Certainly
the ideal of the pastoral was always reckoned an illusion, although
it was a very favourite one. No one ever attempted to deny that
it was an artificial form of a r t ; but it was a suitable playground
for some imaginations; and when we find Ealeigh in his reply
to Marlowe's pastoral song exposing all its pretty delusions,
taking away all the natural though shallow charm that some of
the verses dictated by its spirit certainly had, we feel that the old
age of the Elizabethan period has indeed come, in all its sternness and grimness, even without any tender memory of its
youthful feelings.
" If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
" But time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold ;
And Philomel becometh dumb ;
The rest complains of cares to come.
" T h e flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields :
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrows fall.
" T h y gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten—
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
' * Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs—
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
1c

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need ;
Then those delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love."

Sir Walter Ealeigh had little time for writing, so engrossed
was he in all the political and military schemes and court
intrigues of the day. But all that he did write is tinged with
philosophic reflectiveness, and sometimes a gloomy sententious-

CHAP. V.]

POETRY.

131

ness. There is none of the young Elizabethan joyousness about
him; rather the severe religious spirit of the mediaeval mystic—
" Of death and judgment, heaven and hell,
Who oft doth think, must needs die well."

Himself one of the most outwardly chivalrous of Elizabethans,
he is yet guilty of verse which, in its tendency towards moralising of the most commonplace kind, would take the life out of
any system of chivalry.
" For those desires that aim too high
For any mortal lover,
When reason cannot make them die,
Discretion doth them lower."

If this had been characteristic of the tone and expression of all
Baleigh's works, he could not claim a place even among the lesser
philosophic artists of his time. But he has written poems which
show that he had real and profound moral sensibilities, jarred
by the worldliness and sordidness of the life into which he had
plunged, and which he found so difficult; as, for example, the
small poem called " The Lie "—
" So, soul, the body's guest
Upon a thankless arrant 1 :
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant :
Go, since I needs must die
And give the world the lie.
" Tell zeal it wants devotion :
Tell love it is but lust,
Tell time it is but motion,
Tell flesh it is but dust :
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.
'' Tell age it daily wasteth:
Tell honor how it alters,
Tell beauty how she blasteth,
Tell favour how it falters :
And as they shall reply,
Give every one the lie."

Very early in the period were written lyrics and songs expressing
that weariness of things which seeks consolation in a sort of
sententious philosophy, and believes the greatest happiness to
consist in a state of cultivated content—a condition which, in
1

Errand.

ELIZABETHAN ART.

132

both senses of t h e term, leaves nothing to hope for.
wrote t h e song b e g i n n i n g —

[CHAP. V.

Greene

" Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content,"

ending—
a

A mind content both crown and kingdom is."

Dyer, the friend of Sidney and Greville, is remembered chiefly
by one poem, attributed to him—
" My mind to me a kingdom is :
Such present joys therein I find,
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind :
Though much I want which most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave."

Sir Henry Wotton writes of the character of a happy life, of the
bliss of the man
" Whose passions not his masters are,
"Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath."

But the most profoundly reflective poems of the day,—poems
which are animated by the real philosophic and enquiring spirit,
and not stimulated by mere personal dissatisfaction,—are those
of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, and Sir John Davies.
Lord Brooke throws light on his purposes in writing. " For
my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the
images of life than the images of wit, and therefore chose not to
write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod,
as the proverb is, but to those only that are weather-beaten in
the sea of this world, such as, having lost the sight of their
gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks
and quicksand."
In the tragedy of Mustapha he says—
" Man should make much of life as Nature's table
"Wherein she writes the cypher of her glory.
Forsake not nature, nor misunderstand her :
Her mysteries are read without Faith's eyesight:
She speaketh in our flesh : and from our senses
Delivers down her wisdoms to our reason.
If any man would break her laws to kill,
Nature doth for defence allow offences."

Lord Brooke, says Mr. Ward, has great thinking power, but

CHAP. V.]

POETEY.

133

his powers of expression were not equal to the strength of his
mental capacity. "Words are taxed beyond what they can
bear : all thoughts, whether great or trivial, are tortured into the
same over-laboured dress : there is no ease, no flow, no joy."
Yet at times his verse is impressive from the very nobility of the
thoughts it conveys ; as, for instance, the lines in his treatise on
" Human Learning "—
" The chief use then in man of that he knows
Is his painstaking for the good of all ;
Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
Not laughing from a melancholy gall,
Not hating from a soul that overflows
With bitterness, breathed out from inward thrall,
But sweetly rather to ease, to loose or bind,
As need requires, this frail fall'n humankind."
But it needs not to be pointed out that the philosophic poets are
inferior to the other poets of their great generation, both in their
temperaments, which were the reverse of artistic, and also because their natures led them to think that every subject, under
every aspect, was material for the poet. Sir John Davies, like
Lord Brooke, wrote on " Human Knowledge," and " On the Soul
of Man and the Immortality thereof," these two " elegies " constituting his great work Nosce Teipsum. Inferior to Lord Brooke
in the qualities that go to make the true philosopher, he was
superior in artistic skill,—in the selection, arrangement, and
management of his thought. In easier and smoother verse he
dwells on " that divine discontent," beyond which, however, he
and many of his school never seemed to go. He speaks of the
soul—how
" Under heaven she cannot light on aught
That with her heavenly nature doth agree ;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be."
How that we go through the world and never possess our souls—
" We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,
And pass both tropics and behold the poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own souls."
As far as poetry is concerned the philosophic school only deserves
notice as marking the decline of the art of the great Elizabethan
period. It is indeed a great and noble decline, but it is certainly

134

ELIZABETHAN ART.

[CHAP. V.

the decline of that great age which was so full of exuberance
and energy, so interested in the mere exercise of its own faculties,
so open to interest in all aspects and sides of life, so contented
in the healthiness of its being. When we see men like Sir
John Davies and Lord Brooke, especially men like Lord Brooke,
full of earnest thought and feeling, dwelling mostly on the unsatisfactoriness of life, the want of gratification that it affords to
the highest and noblest cravings of human nature,—we feel that
the brilliant period of art is indeed passing away, that outward
circumstances have ceased to stimulate and encourage a life
which is happy and energetic because it is in harmony with its
surroundings. I t was evident that life, both national and intellectual, was beginning to offer hard problems to solve. The life
of the best and thinking people became more and more reflective,
and in proportion art and poetry declined, and prose, the vehicle
of reasoned conclusions, improved.
But before this epoch arrived English art had culminated in
the drama, and Shakspere, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, and even
Beaumont and Fletcher in their way, proved how great could
be English dramatic genius.

CHAPTEE VI.
RISE OF THE DRAMA.1

King John (1548 circ.) By Bishop BALE.
Gorboduc. 1562. First three acts by Thomas NORTON; the last two by
Thomas SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst.
Ralph Roister Doister. 1551 or earlier. By UDALL.
Gammer Gurton's Needle. Probably 1575. Probably by STILL.
IN the Elizabethan age was the highest development of the English
national drama, because only by that age were united the two
essential requisites for great dramatic art. The Elizabethans
enjoyed a wide and closely national life, and the drama is an art
which, like architecture, requires the co-operation of a large and
united nation. More than any other art, it depends for success
and encouragement on public opinion; it must mirror the tastes
and instincts of the national mind, and in return its image
must be recognised and appreciated. And secondly, Elizabethan
national life furnished all the material that the drama required,—
great crises, great events, great personages, strange and exciting
vicissitudes of fortune. The brilliant and exciting foreign policy
of Henry VIII., the Eeformation under himself and his successors, the position it gave England in Europe, thrilling in its
insecurity and importance,—all this gave to the nation excitement, while it made it feel its unity. It was kept at a high
strain throughout the whole of the sixteenth century; yet at the
latter end of this century, the period when the drama flourished
most brilliantly, there came a time of comparative quiet, which
gave the necessary leisure and opportunity for production. Then
this brilliant and interesting national life found expression in
dramatic art, which never before, and never since, in England
has had such a vigorous life, and such high ideals.
1
The substance of this chapter is almost entirely taken from Mr. Ward's
Dramatic Literature.

136

RISE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. VI.

And yet, like every other form of life, physical or literary,
the drama has had a gradual development: there is a history of
its growth, and without tracing this history it is impossible to
understand the nature and the importance of the sudden burst
of Elizabethan dramatic art. It was not alone the outburst of
the vigorous mental life which we call the Kenaissance,—it was
not alone the influence of classic models introduced through Italy
which produced i t : it had its origin before; its raison d'etre lay
deep down in the national life; it was the satisfaction of needs
such as are naturally felt by every people united by common
interest. But before the Renaissance the drama was small and
slight; it gave small promise of that magnificent development
which culminated in the latter half of the sixteenth century.
Early dramas consisted merely in plot: they could claim to be
dramas only because they represented by way of imitation the
unity of an action. But the ideal and complete drama has three
requisites: it requires not only plot; but secondly, externals—such
as literary externals, which consist in diction and versification,
and stage externals—the dramatic mise-en-scene, the elements of
music, scenic decoration, etc.; and lastly, as its most artistic and
valuable element, the interest given by characterisation. By the
power of characterisation is meant, not only the power of conceiving a character, of making it real and human, and of preserving its unity throughout the whole play, but also the power
of developing it with reference to the internal struggle of motive
and of will,—the power of showing how the struggle acts on, and
is acted on, by the influences of the external world. This interest
was not given in full to the drama till Shakspere wrote. Of this
power he was the master; and in him the drama reached its greatest
and highest development, for he possessed not only this supreme
power of dramatic art, but he united with it the two other
necessary dramatic elements,—power of constructing or working
out a plot, and the power of producing an effective mise-en-scene.
Never, either before or after him, have these three essentials been
united in so perfect a manner : we have had attractive dramatic
mise-en-scene ; we have had everything that could attract the eye,
and by that help to tell its own story; we have had ably conceived characters, speaking in polished verse or prose,—the
drama of Dryden and of Addison; we have had well-constructed
plots in the drama of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Chapman, and
of Webster,—but never, except by the genius of Shakspere, have
these three essentials been adequately united.
Of these three requisites plot was the first and most essential

CHAP, vi.]

RISE OF THE DRAMA.

137

—indeed, the element without which it is impossible for a drama
to exist. Naturally and necessarily the beginnings of the drama
in all countries were religious, because only religion could make
the inward unity of an action realisable. This it did by its conception of a supreme being who watched over the whole of the
action—over its preparation, rise, culmination, decline, and fall,
administering the sanction, the reward, or the punishment. " In
France the remains of the Greco-Roman secular drama,—one of
the literary links that united the new and the old world, which
had itself been religious in origin,—lingered on in the performances of the jongleurs and joculatores, who repeated chivalrous
poems of love and war, with imitation of the action." Through
them the spirit of the secular drama struggled with the religious
drama. In England, although we have jongleurs after the
Norman conquest, they were but a temporary foreign growth,
and disappeared soon, giving place entirely to the religious drama.
" Even in the religious services of the Catholic Church, especially
in that highest and most solemn form of service, the mass, is the
suggestion of the dramatic motive afterwards developed through
successive stages into the morality, then into the regular drama."
Hagenbach, in his Kirchengeschichte, says :—"In the wide dimensions which in course of time the mass assumed there lies a grand
—we are almost inclined to say an artistic—idea. A dramatic
progression is perceptible in all the symbolic processes, from the
appearance of the celebrant priest at the altar and the confession
of sins to the Kyrie Eleison, and from this to the grand doxology,
after which the priest turns with the Dominus Vobiscum to the
congregation, and calls upon it to pray. . . . In the mass we
have thus a dramatic action, in part pantomimically presented,
in part aided by both epical and lyrical elements. It has a
beginning, which is at the same time an explanation of its cause,
a central action (immolation, consecration), and a close. From
the mystery of the liturgy to the liturgical drama, nothing is
needed but the dramatic intention." The history of our drama
is found in the development of this dramatic idea through the
successive stages of the mystery plays, whose plots are composed
of the events of the Gospel, of miracle plays, dealing with the
lives of saints, and lastly, of moralities dealing with the action of
personified vices and virtues. From the morality, with the
stimulus of the Renaissance, the passage to the regular drama
was easy and quick. But before these developments could be
entered upon, two things were necessary : " the popularity of the
plays must be secured, in order that through them instruction in

138

RISE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. VI.

divine things could be given; and they could only be made
thoroughly popular by being written not in Latin, but in the
vernacular." This important step was made gradually, early in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Secondly, it was important
that the drama should emancipate itself from the control of the
Church, which, although one of the educating influences of the
Middle Ages, was also at the same time one of the most obstructive. The first step in this direction was made by Innocent
III., in 1210, who ordered that the representation of mysteries
and miracle-plays might take place outside the Church as well as
inside it. " This gave liberty to lay associations, to guilds and
schools, to act plays in honour of their saintly patrons, either in
their own halls or in their vicinity. Soon we find creeping in
elements which the drama could never have fostered had it
remained as an instrument of instruction in the hands of the
Church; scenes and characters of a more or less trivial description
are allowed to mix with the religious motives;" the comic element
begins with Herod, who is generally dressed as a Saracen, and
with the devils, to whom it was thought necessary to give a
hideous and fiendish appearance, in order to excite instantaneous
antipathy.
In the mystery and miracle plays, the great point being the
plot, which was to be a careful representation of some scriptural
or holy action, little attention was paid to literary externals.
In the infancy of the art it could not be expected that any interest
in character should be attempted. Occasionally, however, we
come across quaint pathetic lines like those of the Virgin (in the
Betraying of Christ), which seem to show that the writer realised
his character:—
*' Ah ! Jesu ! Jesu ! Jesu ! Jesu !
"Why should ye suffer this tribulation and adversitie ?
How may they find in their hearts you to pursue,
That never trespassed in no manner degree ?
For never thing but that was good thought ye,
"Wherefore then should ye suffer this great pain ?
I suppose verily it is for the trespass of me,
And I wist that my heart should cleve in twain."

As for stage externals they were of the rudest description.
" The manner of these plays were,—every company had his pageant, which pageants were a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher
and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they played, being all open on
the top, that all beholders might hear and see them. The places

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139

where they played them was in every street. They began first at
the Abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played it was
wheeled to the high cross before the Mayor, and so to every street."
This is the account given by Rogers of the plays held at
Whitsuntide in Chester. The performances were never strictly
confined to the stage : horsemen frequently rode up to the
scaffold and took part in the action ; and in a pageant acted at
Coventry there is a stage-direction which allows Herod " to rage
in the pagond and in the street also." In France the stage was
divided into three platforms, with a dark cavern at the side of the
lowest, appropriated respectively to the Heavenly Father and
his angels, to saints and glorified men; the second to men as
men ; and the third to souls in hell. Hell-mouth was an English
institution; fire was occasionally displayed within. There is
accorded at the occasion of the Draper's Pageant at Coventry
the expense for the keeping up of the fire at hell-mouth. At a
later period simple natural phenomena, which required no elaborate mechanism, such as earthquakes, were introduced. Disembodied souls, which hovered about the stage, were distinguished
by wearing black or white coats according to their kind, and
divine and saintly personages were distinguished by gilt hair
and beards.
As far as we can tell, on the evidence of stage-directions, the
rudeness of stage-externals continued till a very late time in the
history of the drama. As late as 1563 the directions in the
play of Virginius mention the scaffold, as if the stage was still
the movable institution on wheels, used originally for the
mysteries and miracle-plays. Economy in actors, not their
suitability to represent certain personages, was the point most
studied. In Bale's King John (1548) there is a stage-direction
— " Go out England and dress for clergy." In Cambises, written
probably about 1561, a tragedy crowded with characters, it is so
arranged that they can all be done by seven men and one boy.
Even after the founding of theatres,—after Blackfriar's Theatre
and two others had been set up in the fields near Shoreclitch in
1576,—there seems to have been little ingenuity exercised in the
construction or working of stage machinery. A stage-direction
in one of Greene's plays is characteristic both of the rudeness of
the scene mechanism and also of the indifference with which it
was regarded: " Exit Yenus, or, if you can conveniently, let a
chain down from the top of the stage and draw her up." Mr.
Stopford Brooke gives the following description of the Globe
Theatre, built in 1599 :—"In the form of a hexagon outside, it

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[CHAP. VI.

was circular within and open to the weather, except above the
stage. The play began at 3 o'clock; the nobles and ladies sat
on boxes or on stools on the stage; the people stood in the
pit or yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, was a naked
room, with a blanket for a curtain; wooden imitations of
animals, towers, woods, etc., were all the scenery used; and
a board stating the place of action was hung out from the
top when the scene changed." There was much room on the
part of the audience for that "fervid imagination" which, as
Mr. Taine says, readily supplied all they lacked. The Elizabethan imagination required for its illusions no preparations or
perspectives—few or no movable scenes. A scroll in big letters
announced to the public that they were in London or Constantinople—that was enough: there was no trouble about probability. What Sir Philip Sidney says in illustration of the neglect
by contemporary dramatists of the three classic unities serves
also to show the scantiness of stage-externals :—" You shall have
Asia of the one side and Affrick of the other,—so many other
under-kingdoms, that the Player when he comes in must ever
begin by telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.
Now shall you have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then
we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear
newes of shipwreck in the same place, then we are to blame if
we accept it not for a rock; . . . while in the mean time two
armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then
what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field."
M. Taine records that the greatest pleasure he ever experienced from the drama was given him by a strolling company
" of four young girls playing comedy and tragedy on a stage in
a coffee-house." M. Taine was then eleven years old; and he
thinks that the illusions of a fresh imaginative young nature,
eager for joy and ready to find it anywhere, sufficiently supplemented what talent the actors might possess. So it must have
been with a Elizabethan audience : their souls were fresh—" as
ready to feel everything as the artist to dare everything." They
felt no want of the three unities, no deficiencies in the scenery
and the costumes; they idealised the young and probably awkward boys to whom convention assigned the women's parts. The
development, then, of stage-externals came late in the history of
the drama.
Yet it is somewhat astonishing that the cultivation of masques
and pageants, which went on assiduously side by side with the
drama,—these shows, according to Ascham, forming the staple

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141

literary entertainment of the English Court,—should not, by training the eye and the external sense of the audience, have made them
more exacting with reference to the mise-en-scene of the drama
proper. Especially when we find great minds like those of Ben
Jonson and Bacon devoting themselves to the production and
consideration of such entertainments, we are astonished to find
that they did not influence the dramatic stage to a greater extent.
But Bacon, although he, with two other gentlemen, prepared
a show which was to supplement the performance of the Misfortunes of Arthur (1587),—although he takes a scientific
interest in noting down " those things which do naturally take
the sense," and does not "respect petty wonderments,"—yet he is
anxious to show that he considers the whole matter of trifling
importance. His essay on " Masques and Triumphs " begins—
" These things are but toys to come amongst such serious observations," and concludes with the impatient observation—"Enough
of such toys."
Perhaps it would not be too much to say that in proportion
as real dramatic talent decreased,—in proportion as plays offered
less satisfaction to the imagination and intellect, — attention
became more concentrated on the mise-en-scene—on those dramatic qualities which move the sense alone. Who can find fault
now with the stage-externals of our best theatres? But who can
feel satisfied with the quality of what is acted and with its manner
of representation1?
Even the Renaissance, then, with its longings for splendour
and magnificence,—for all that can delight the eye,—-did not
develop the drama much in this respect. "What the Renaissance
did was to give the finishing touch to the development, already
begun, of the morality into the human and secular drama.
The essential characteristic of the morality, which in the
second quarter of the fifteenth century was a recognised form of
stage entertainment, is literary allegory, which, always satisfactory
to the Teutonic mind, had received a lasting impulse from the
French models, which were influential after the Norman conquest.
" I t was no difficult transition," says Mr. Ward, "from the devil
of the mysteries and miracle-plays to the vice of the moralities;
and once the idea of personified qualities realised, all the material
for allegory was complete. . . . But moralities never domesticated
themselves among the English till they had come to connect
themselves with the political and religious questions of the day."
The popularity of Piers Plowman, dreaming on the Malvern
Hills, shows what interest could be attached to long and com-

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[CHAP. VI.

plicated allegory, full of religious and ecclesiastical significance.
" But unfortunately, during the time of the Eeformation, when
various questions were at issue, which would have given admirable material to the morality-stage, the fitful and capricious
despotism of Henry VIII. with regard to these questions made
it dangerous for it to stand forward openly as the exponent of
public opinion." Nevertheless, although its development was
stunted, and it was superseded by the more advanced species of
drama, we have a few examples of the fully-developed morality;
as, for instance, in Skelton's Magnificence (written after 1515),
of which the object is to offer
*' A playne example of worldly vainglory,
How in this world there is no sekernesse,
But fallible flattery enmixed with bitterness."

" I t is written," says Mr. Ward, " i n the true spirit of the
Eeformation, hatred of ecclesiastical dominion,—its literary tone
being a return to that natural sense and vivacity which characterised Chaucer." John Skelton is indeed the one genuine poet
that England in the early years of the sixteenth century can
claim. A poet who made it the glory of his verse that although
it was " ragged and jagged," it had " in it some pith," was likely
to find suitable material for his genius in the morality. Magnificence is seduced by the company of false friends, Counterfeit
Countenance, Crafty Conveyance, into a wild unrestrained life,
which ultimately must lead to ruin. He associates with Adversity
and Poverty, Despair and Mischief; but before the depths of
wickedness are reached he is recovered by Good Hope, who, with
the aid of Bedress, Circumspection, and Perseverance, brings him
to recognise the error of his ways.
There are also other moralities analogous to this in the broad
general moral lesson they would convey, exhibiting the pernicious results of riotous living. Some of them are concerned with
the vital religious question of the day, and express hatred to Borne
and her corrupt clergy, such as Newe Custom (p. 1573), a purely
controversial production; its characters, which can be undertaken
by four players, representing the Church of Borne and its supporters against the Eeformation and its supporters. Perverse
Doctrine goes further in its expression of hatred to Eome. It
personifies not only Perverse Doctrine but Ignorance as Popish
priests, giving them for friends Hypocrisy, Cruelty, and Avarice.
Perverse Doctrine, who regards the spread of the Bible as " casting
pearls before swine," is opposed by New Custom and Light of

CHAP. VI.]

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143

the Gospel, with their friends Edification, Assurance, and God's
Felicitie, who, quoting Paul to the Corinthians, declare the
mass, purgatory, and pardons, to be flat against God's words;
ultimately Light of the Gospel succeeds in converting Perverse
Doctrine. A further step had been made in the history of the
morality in Ally on Knight (prohibited in 1557 by order of the
Privy Council), " a morality written with the object of removing
the ill-feeling on the part of the commonality against the nobility,
as well as the jealousy between the lords spiritual and the lords
temporal, the hero of it being a personification of England—its
moral, the evil results of discord."
Albyon Knight may be fairly said to be a morality, but there
were other dramas written about this time hovering very doubtfully on the boundary line that separated moralities from the
regular drama. " The essence of the morality being the allegory,
we must consider that it loses the character of pure morality,
when a personage who is not an embodiment, not a personification that belongs to the world of allegory, is introduced." Tom
Tiler and his Wife (1578) has, then, more of the nature of a
drama proper than of a morality. Though there are in the play
allegorical abstractions, such as Desire the Yice, and though
Tom Tiler's wife is herself half an abstraction, half a type, yet
the presence of Tom Tiler himself raises it to the level of the
drama, giving, as it does, the second place to the morality
element. Tom Tiler headed a series of doubtful boundary productions, including Appius and Virginia, King Cambises, and even
Bale's King John, in which the dramatic and morality element
mix. Thus dramatic art, even before it came under Kenaissance influence, had shown that the necessity of giving immediate
personal interest was felt, " if these moral truths were to call forth
any agreement beyond that of mere calm acquiescence. . . . Abstract qualities, personifications, were cold, with little capacity for
calling forth vivid emotions of pity and terror. These emotions
could only be excited in a high degree by abandoning the basis
on which the moralities were constructed." What the Kenaissance influence did was to supply material which suggested the
conception of characters of real flesh and blood,—human types,
calculated to interest their fellow-creatures. This it did through
classic and Italian models.
And first came the influence of Italian models, for long before
the Eenaissance asserted itself in England, Italian tragedy had
seized on subjects of national interest. Long before the company
of Italian actors visited England and acted before the Queen in

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[CHAP. VI.

1578, the Italian stage had become national and historical. The
Capture of Cesena, written in the fourteenth century, dealt with
that event which happened in 1357. The Italians became proverbial for their aptitude in finding material. Kyd, in his
Spanish tragedy, alludes to the Italian tragedians who were so
sharp of wit,
' ' That in one hour's meditation
They would perform anything in action."

It was the Italians who first brought into England historical
writing of a more attractive description. An Italian wrote an
English history in Latin under Henry VII. and VIII. The
"concordance of histories " was produced in Henry VII.'s reign; it
was part of the work of the New Learning to promote the study
of national history; " the Tudors and the authors in their employ,
by means of historical literature, blackened their adversaries and
glorified their friends; reformers recurred to the lessons of past
reigns; it was seen that, with the help of the chronicles of past
times, a practical lesson might be read to the living generation;
and thus of all the forms of controversial morality, that of the
historical morality seemed most to recommend itself by its impressiveness, its interest, and also, and this was no slight consideration,—one which had fettered the morality in its free later
development,—by its comparative safety." The nature of this
transition from the allegoric morality to the human drama is
significant of the growth of art in a Puritan and Teutonic country.
The lesson comes first, and then the art to render the lesson
attractive. The drama is not concerned with " trifling sport, in
fantaisie framed, nor such like gaudish gere," but with " things
that shall your inward stomach cheer." Thus wrote Bale in the
Prologue to GooVs Promises in 1538. Bale's play of King John,
on which his title to fame mostly rests, was circulated in 1548,
and "breathes the very spirit that animated the country in the
early years of Edward VI." It is a suitable illustration of this
transition; " it is an emphatic defiance of Pope and Popery, in a
tone which would please men like Somerset and the Calvinistic
Reformers, who made war on the relics of the Boman ritual and
church wealth spared by Henry VIII.; but its moral is enforced
not through the mouth of embodied vices and virtues, not pointed
through their action, but through the mouth and action of a
well-known national personage, King John." The play begins with
a speech from him, declaring his descent and position, and
announcing his intention to do his duty by his people. Then

CHAP. VI.]

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145

England enters as a widow beseeching the King to protect her
from her oppressors. Her language concerning them is plain
and significant; they principally consist of
"Such lubbers as have disguised heads in their hoods
"Which in idleness do live by other men's goods,
Monks, canons and nuns in divers colors and shape,
Both white black and pied ; God send their increase ill happe."
Sedition, who conducts mainly the action of the play, is its solitary comic character, being the embodiment of the spirit of evil
and mockery. He tells King John that the Pope is at- the
bottom of the evils under which the country is suffering. The
understanding of the reader is suddenly troubled in the middle of
the play by " the assumption of historic personality on the part
of some of the allegoric characters." Sedition becomes Stephen
Langton, Private Wealth the Cardinal Pandulphus, Usurped
Power the Pope. Together they agree in issuing an interdict
over England ; under pressure the King gives up his crown, and,
in defiance of all historic truth, he dies as a royal victim, uttering
words which cast a pathos over his end—
" Farewell, sweet England, now last of all to thee ;
I am right sorry I could do for thee no more.
Farewell once again, yea, farewell for evermore."
At this point, when the morality, with the help of the feeling for
history, showed a tendency to develop into the drama proper,
through its offshoot the historical morality,—the morality proper
still continuing to exist side by side with it till the end of Elizabeth's
reign,—dramatic productions separate themselves into tragedy
and comedy. As a rule, especially in the early times of the drama,
when life did not represent itself as complex to the minds of
dramatists, it was easy to include all dramatic productions in one
of these two classes, comedies being so " i n virtue of mirth,"
tragedies in virtue of " killing." We have indeed Damon and
Pythias (prob. 1571), by Edwardes, which includes both elements,
and was called by him a comedy, although the tragic element
predominated. For this mixture there is a classic precedent in
the Alcestis of Euripides; and plays of this kind were written by
the Italians, who invented for them the term tragi-comedy. The
same term is used by the dramatist Fletcher in rather a different
sense. " Tragic-comedy," he says in his Dedication to The
Faithful Shepherdess, " is not tragedy, in respect that it wants
deaths, and not comedy, because it brings people very near to it,
L

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[CHAP. VI.

It is," he concludes, " a representation of familiar people, with
such trouble as no life can be without." But the term 1 of which
this is the definition was not much wanted by our early dramatists. As a rule, their productions dealt not with familiar people
leading the ordinary chequered career of mortals, but with distinguished historic or purely imaginary people, who indulged
in the extremes of " killing," or the extremes of mirth. There
is no difficulty, therefore, in separating thus broadly into tragedy
and comedy the plays which now begin to increase in number
and variety.
To the direct influence of Seneca is ascribed the composition
of the first English tragedy. Between 1559 and 1581 ten of
Seneca's plays were translated, and Gorboduc, or Porrex and
Ferrex, is based on Seneca's Thehais, though the subject is taken
from British legend. It was written in 1562 ; the first three
acts were said in the first edition to have been written by
Thomas Norton, the last two by Sackville. Although the
frequent change of scene shows a disregard of the three unities,
probably due to the influence of Spanish models, yet classic
influence still shows itself strongly in the chorus which closes
each act, and in the fact that murders are not performed on
the stage—the announcement of them being made by messengers. The first original work of magnitude of English literature written in blank verse, it is also important as suggesting
the further advance of the dramatic art by the dumb show
which precedes each act, setting forth the contents of the act
which follows in order to prevent the spectator from being so
absorbed in the interest of the incidents as to distract his attention from the language, the characters, the general manner of
treatment.
Of superior construction to Gorboduc is another early tragedy,,
Appius and Virginia (circulated 1563), of which the author is
unknown. The point of the plot is the destruction of the
domestic bliss of Virginia and his wife and daughter by Appius.
It is concise in idea, and the plot is well managed. It is neither
so bloody nor so involved as Norton and Sackville's tragedy, in
the argument of which we are told that the sons of Gorboduc
falling into dissension, the younger kills the elder, the mother for
revenge killing the younger; the people, " moved with the cruelty
of the fact, rising and killing the father and mother : the nobility,
rising in their turn and terribly destroying the rebels, ultimately
falling to civil war, in which both they and many of their issues.
1

Our term " high-comedy " seems to correspond to Fletcher's definition.

CHAP, VL]

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147

were terribly slain, and the land for a long time almost desolate
and miserably wasted." If deaths, as Fletcher says, make a
tragedy, here indeed was one. The literary merit of another
" lamentable tragedy," containing the life, bad deeds, and death of
Cambises, King of Persia (probably about 1561), has had lasting
fame given to it by Shakspere, though probably not of the kind
its author would have wished, by his mention of it in Henry
IV., Part I. Act ii. Scene 4.
Between 1560-80 a large variety of plays, showing classical
influence by their choice of subject, were represented at court, some
of them being mythological, some of them historical,—under the
latter head are Scipio Africanus, and a play called Ptoleme, which
Gosson excepts from his general censure; as well as " That
Pig of his own Sow," called Catilin's Conspiracy. The Jocasta
of Gascoigne, a free adaptation of the Euripides, was acted
in 1566. Damon and Pythias, whose author is termed " the
flower of our realm and phoenix of our age," cannot be said to
mark any advance in dramatic art, it being one of the clumsiest
of our early plays, especially in its language, making, as it does,
an unsuccessful attempt to get rid of the monotony of rhyme by
neglecting the csesura.
The fetters of classic models in tragedy were first broken by
some author unknown, who produced as a tragedy a dramatic
version of the story of Borneo and Juliet. So we must believe
on the authority of Arthur Brooke, who in 1562 printed a metrical paraphrase of Benedello's history of Romeo and Juliet, stating
that he had seen " the same argument lately set forth on the
stage." Then followed numerous plays taken from Italian story,
among which one, Tancred and Gismunda,—first acted in 1568,
the plot taken from Boccaccio's Decameron,—shows the struggle
between the classical tastes of its author and his desire to do
justice to the romantic character of the subject. In the first
four acts the classical element predominates : there are choruses
of maidens which help to explain the action, the most tragic incidents of which are at first kept behind the scene; but in the
last act Gismunda drinks her death from the golden cup—in which
her father has put the heart of her lover—on the stage, and on
the stage too dies her broken-hearted father, who slays himself
with his own hands. Not only stern moralists like Ascham, but
even playwrights themselves, such as George Whetstone, distrusted
Italian influence. Yet Whetstone took the plot of his Promos
and Cassandra from an Italian story, so we may assume that it
was only the Italian stage that he condemns in that dedication to

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[CHAP. VI.

this play. " At this day," he says, " the Italian is so lascivious
in his comedies that honest hearers are grieved at his actions,"
contrasting him with the German, " who is too holy; for he
presents on every common stage what preachers should pronounce
in pulpit,"—a criticism which might reasonably have been applied
a short time earlier to the English stage.
Finally, a return to the subjects of the chronicle histories
indicated that the classical influence and Italian influence had
done their work as educators, and that a stimulus to choose and
treat truly national themes had begun. The Misfortunes of
Arthur by T. Hughes, acted in 1587, though, as Mr. Ward says,
" one of the most remarkable of our early tragedies," dealt with
a personage who, though claiming to belong to the historic past
of England, is too mythical to satisfy the national desire for
history. More satisfactory was the famous Victorie of Henry V.,
written and acted before 1588 ; but the best example of chronicle
history play is The Troublesome Reign of King John (prob. 1591),
" in which," says Mr. Ward, " the facts are duly given, but where
the author shows himself fully alive to the political lessons of
his subject." The tragedy of Sir Thomas More (circ. 1596) is
striking, as showing how soon it was possible to put great public
events into a dramatic form—even historical events connected
with the recent dubious policy of Henry VIII. With great tact
More's fall is treated as a heaven-sent calamity. " A very worthy
gentleman seals error with his blood," says the character whose
speech concludes the play. And now only an author of genius
was needed to make the drama the artistic rendering of contemporary life, to give to the stage its fit and proper position, as
a national art, dealing with all the interests of national life.
A similar development had been going on in the sphere of
comedy. The transition from the moralities, in which the comic
element consisted of exaggerations and elaboration of Herod and
the devils, " required some writer who would be bold enough to
throw overboard altogether the traditionary machinery and the
personified abstractions of allegory, and to elevate to the first
place the personal types which had gradually been introduced."
Such a writer was John Heywood, the author of our first interludes, in some of which his aim is merely to excite mirth, in
others to indulge in satire and point a moral. The Four P's
(circ. 1540), the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the
Pedlar, contains a certain amount of moral satire. The Pedlar
has to decide which is the greatest liar of the first three. The
circumstantial lies of the Pardoner and Palmer are outdone by

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149

the direct lies of the Poticary; and though there is much incidental satire with reference to the religious questions of the day,
as for instance the Palmer on Pilgrimages—
" And when ye have gone as far as ye can,
For all your labor and gostely entente,
Ye will come home as wise as ye wente "—
yet Heywood takes pains to show that he is a believer, trying to
show that it is the abuse and not the use of the means of edification that he has been satirising. He stimulates faith, saying-—
'' But where ye doubt, the truth not knowing,
Believing the best, good may be growing,
In judging the best, no harm at the least;
In judging the worst, no good at the best."
And in matters of doctrine he says—
" But best in these things it"seemeth to me,
To take no judgment upon ye ;
But as the Church doth judge or take them,
So do ye receive or forsake them.
So be you sure ye cannot err,
But may be a fruitful follower."
Similar in purpose is the Merry Play between the Pardoner
and the Frere, the Curate, and Neighbour Pratt (circ. 1520).
More purely humorous in its intention — and Hey wood's
humour is refreshing to the reader of the tedious moralities, " a
ripple on the broad surface of good sense "—is the Play of the
Weather (prob. 1533), which bears a great resemblance to the
moralities. The gods who superintend the several phenomena of
the weather,—Phoebus, Saturn, iEolus, and Phoebe,—make complaint against one another before Jupiter, who, through Merry
Eeport, the Vice, summons human witnesses. The Play of Love
reminds one rather of a feudal and middle-age story. Love and
her victims constitute the characters of the play. The four
human characters are the lover not beloved, the woman beloved
not loving, the lover beloved, and one neither lover nor loved.
We have one comedy, The Disobedient Child (before 1560),
by Thomas Ingelend, showing the transition from moralities to
comedy proper in the mixture it contains of human and allegorical characters, before we come to the first real English comedy
(1551, or earlier), Ralph Roister Doister, the work of an
English scholar and schoolmaster called Udall, who has

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[CHAP. VI.

modelled it closely on the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. The
characters, with names such as Goodluck and Tristram Trusty,
conduct themselves according to the promise of their names;
but the characterisation, such as it is, can hardly be called
symbolic. It gives the first faint suggestion of that classic idea
of comic characterisation which was fully developed and dramatically expressed by Ben Jonson in his Theory of Humours.
Inferior both in plot and language is Gammar Gurton/s
Needle (prob. 1575), probably also the work of an English scholar
and schoolmaster, John Still, who ended a successful life in
1607 as Bishop of Bath and Wells. The interest of the play is
chiefly historic, and consists in the character of the fool Diccon.
This character, together with that of Cacurgus in Misogonus,
a play written probably in 1560 by Thomas Eychardes, illustrates the transition from the Vice of the moralities to the fullydeveloped clown of Shakspere's plays and in those of his
contemporaries. A stimulus to development in this direction
was probably given by the buffoons met with in Italian novels
and plays, and a useful personage in which to embody the idea
was found in the half-historic personality of Will Summer, the
court fool of Henry VIII., employed both by Eychardes and
later by Nash. English comedy was thus not only stimulated
indirectly by Italy, by means of classic literature, by the plays
of Plautus and Terence, but the direct national influence of
Italy was seen in Gascoigne's Supposes, which suggested to
Shakspere part of the plot of the Taming of the Shrew (acted
1566), a translation of / Suppositi of Ariosto, and in the list
of plays acted at court from 1568 to 1580, which show the
influence of the study of Italian literature.
To this point, then, had the drama attained about the year
1580. But the drama vas an art was yet in its infancy. The
cause of its first appearance, the desire to render religion and
morality attractive, still lingered on in it. We have seen how
dramatists, both tragic and comic, still vaguely or definitely continued to think it necessary to make their play contain a lesson,
and chose their plots and treated them with reference to their
capacity for pointing morals; and a conscious purpose of this
kind is fatal to any art. Also we have seen how all that could
attract the eye, that could give illusions through the senses to
help out the reality of the dramatic conception, was neglected on
the stage proper; and lastly, we must notice that this early
drama contains only the faintest suggestions of that highest
element of dramatic art—interest in character. It is deaths, as

CHAP, vi.]

RISE OF THE DRAMA.

151

Fletcher says, which make a tragedy; it is a succession of comic
incidents and practical jokes which make a comedy. Between
Ralph Bolster Doister and As You Like It—between Gorboduc
and Hamlet—there is a comparatively small gap in time, but an
immeasurable one from the point of view of dramatic art. I t
is, then, to the genius of those men who are called Shakspere's
predecessors, and above all to the genius of Shakspere himself,
that we owe the rapid and brilliant growth of the drama from
1580 to 1608; it is to the vigorous English genius, freed from
restraint, and stimulated by national excitement and prosperity,
that we owe this burst of unparalleled and peculiarly English
and national art.

C H A P T E R VII.
SHAKSPERE'S PEEDECESSOKS.

LYLY, John, 1554-1606.—The Woman in the Moon, written before 1584 ;
Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes, prob. 1584 ; Sapho and Phao,
prob. 1584; Endymion, the Man in the Moon, prob. 1591 ; Galathea,
prob. 1592; Mydas, prob. 1592 ; Mother Bombie, prob. 1594 ; Love's
Metamorphosis, prob. 1601.
LODGE, Thomas, 1558(?)-1625.—The Wounds of Civill War lively set forth
in the true tragedies of Marius and Scylla, acted 1590 circ.
NASH, Thomas, 1565 circ.-1602 circ.—Summer's Last Will and Testament,
acted 1592.
PEELE, George, 1552 circ.-1597 circ.—The Arraignment of Paris, 1584 ;
Sir Glyomen and Sir Clamydes, circ. 1584 ; Pageants, 1585-1591 ;
Chronicle of Edward I., 1593 ; The Battle of Alcazar, pub. 1594, acted
by 1591; Old Wives' Tale, acted before 1595 ; David and Bethsdbe, by
1598.
KYD, Thomas, d. 1594 circ.—The Spanish Tragedy, acted prob. in 1588.
GREENE, Eobert, 1559-60(?)-1592. — Orlando Furioso, acted by 1591;
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, acted by 1591; Alphonsus, King of
Aragon, acted by 1592; James IV. of Scotland, acted by 1592 ;
George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, acted by 1592 ; A Looking Glass for London and England, written with Lodge, acted by 1592.

THE drama was therefore comparatively unemancipated when
Lyly, the first of that group of men called Shakspere's predecessors, lived and wrote. Shakspere was undoubtedly infinitely greater from every point of view than any of his contemporaries—Marlowe perhaps excepted—because of the youthful
promise of his genius, which his short life did not allow him
to mature. Yet the condition of the stage, after these artists had
lived and written, compared with what it had been before,
shows how greatly their work had tended to develop its possibilities. Shakspere at his best obeyed no rules: with the
strength and freedom of genius he succeeded ultimately in
emancipating himself from conventions and formulas; but the
way was prepared for him by these men: they did much to

CHAP, V I L ]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

153

loosen the hold of stage-convention, and in the work of some
of them,—in the versification of Greene and Marlowe,—in the
attempts at characterisation of Kyd,—we see more than hints of
that dramatic power which makes the greatness of Shakspere's
genius.
Among these men, Shakspere's contemporaries in point of
time, but his predecessors in the dramatic art, Lyly stands not
only first but alone. His work belongs to that earlier period of
art and literature, that time of imitation and attempt, which
prepared and gave place to the robuster and more original form
of art which marks the most brilliant period of the Elizabethan
age. In dramatic literature Lyly's work had the same characteristics that distinguished it in other fields of literature: there
is visible the same careful attention to style, the same careful
elaboration of literary details, the same fantastic and refined
idealism.
Classical allusion, alliteration, antithesis, "the uncalled-for
pun," are characteristic of his dramatic work, as they do his
literary work. Lyly, during his university career, had acquired
two things: an acquaintance with Ovid, to whom he was
attracted by his taste for allegory, and a superficial but wide
acquaintance with the classics, both of which he turned to account
in his literary work. Most of his plays are derived from classical
history or legend: and "from Jupiter himself down to the humblest
serving-man all are familiar with passages from Ovid, Yirgil, and
Cicero." He it was who carried to its greatest extent the tendency
of the time to introduce classical deities as representatives of
corresponding qualities; and in most of his plays there is an
allegorical meaning, not indeed as a rule deep or significant,—
perhaps allusions to some small contemporary intrigue,—yet a
meaning going beyond that of the actual facts of the plot, which
gives ample exercise to the ingenuity and industry of his commentators. But what more than anything else stamps Lyly's
work as belonging to a lower period of art than that of his
companions in the group of Shakspere's predecessors is the mark
which it bears of servility to the needs and taste of the court.
Yet not the arduous work of the whole of Lyly's literary life,
beginning with the publication of the Euphues in 1579 and lasting till his death in 1606,—not all the attacks which in defiance
of friendship he made on Gabriel Harvey in the cause of his
patron, the Earl of Oxford, not all his complimentary allegorical
allusions to the Queen, not all his open, shameless flattery to her,—
could gain for him the office he so much coveted—that of Master

154

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

of the Eevels. But the absence of high originality in Lyly's
works, the absence of that robuster genius which characterised
the works of Greene and Marlowe, the sameness and slightness
of his thought,—was due to his prostration before the fashionable
ideal, to the fact that he looked upon his work mainly as a profession, and as one that could be remunerative in proportion as
it produced works that pleased; and that only secondarily did
he regard it seriously as an art. Lyly's art indeed consisted in
pleasing : if he can be said to have had genius, it must be found
to consist in his perfect adaptability to the fashionable literary
needs of the time, in his capacity for clothing slight thoughts in an
agreeable, graceful form.
Lyly's first play, The Woman in the Moon, is, considering the
tendencies of its author, tolerably straightforward and simple both
in construction and language. Pandora, the woman in the moon,
is created by Nature with the help of Concord and Discord in
answer to the demands of the shepherds for a representative of the
female sex. This being is gifted with various qualities by the gods,
Saturn making her sullen, Jove proud, and Mars bloody-minded.
She becomes involved in complications by Venus, and is ultimately
banished to the moon, whither her husband Stesias is bound to
follow her, he becoming the man in the moon as she the woman in
the moon. In this play, whose plot is of little interest, commentators cannot even prove there are no clear allusions to contemporary events, though one goes so far as to think that there is
a meaning in the story—a meaning which identifies Elizabeth
with the moon—and this is the "piquantest thing in the whole
play." Additional interest has been infused into two of Lyly's
plays, Midas and Endymion, by finding in them significant but
dark allusions to contemporary events. Midas is supposed to
represent occasionally Philip of Spain, Diana Elizabeth, Lesbos
being England, " which the gods pitched out of the world as not
controlled by any in the world." Significant in its allusions,
but less widely national in its tendency, is the play of Endymion. Endymion's sleep represents Leicester's imprisonment at
Greenwich. The intervention of Eumenides, who pleads with
Cynthia for the shortening of Endymion's sleep, is the mediation
of the Earl of Sussex between Leicester and the Queen. Tellus,
who is supposed to represent the Countess of Sheffield, to whom
Leicester was clandestinely married, endeavours to draw Endymion
away from Cynthia : " the sweetness of thy life : the bitterness
of thy death." Floscula says to her—and the speech contains a
specimen of the nature of the flattery that was administered

CHAP, VII.]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

155

to Elizabeth—"Madame, if you would compare the state of
Cynthia with your own : and the height of Endimion his thoughts
with the meanness of your fortune, you would rather yield than
contend, being between you and her, no comparison : and rather
wonder than rage at the greatness of his mind, being affected
with a thing more than mortal." Endymion tries to hide " his
thoughts, which are stitched to the stars," to dissemble his passion
for Cynthia, the sweet Cynthia whom " time cannot touch, because
she is divine, nor will offend because she is delicate;" but he cannot
conceal it from Tellus. She sends Endymion into a deep sleep,
from which he is revived by the kiss of Cynthia—" I will not be
so stately, good Endimion, not to stoop to do thee good: and if
thy liberty consist in a kiss from me, thou shalt have i t : and
though my mouth hath been heretofore as untouched as my
thoughts, yet now to recover thy life (though to restore thy
youth it be impossible), I will do that to Endimion which never
yet mortal man could boast of heretofore, nor shall ever hope for
hereafter."
There is a certain idealism in the play, refined perhaps almost
to affectation, which suggests the really high standards of true
Euphuism, of which Lyly and the so-called Euphuists are only
degenerate followers. Endymion's elaborate speech to Cynthia has
in it a touch of true chivalry:—" I honoured your highness above
all the world; but to stretch it so far as to call it love, I never
durst. There hath none pleased my eye but Cynthia, none
delighted mine ears but Cynthia, none possessed my heart but
Cynthia. I have forsaken all other fortunes to follow Cynthia,
and here I stand ready to die if it please Cynthia. Such a
difference hath the gods set between our states that all must be
duty, loyalty and reverence, nothing (without it vouchsafe your
highness) be termed love. My unspotted thoughts, my languishing body, my discontented love, let them obtain by princely
favor that which to challenge they must not presume, only
wishing of impossibilities: with imagination of which I will
spend my spirits, and to myseK, that no creature may hear, softly
call it love. And' if any urge to utter what I whisper, then will
I name it honor. From thy sweet contemplation, if I be not
driven, I shall live of all men the most content, taking more
pleasure in mine aged thoughts, than ever I did in my youthful
actions."
In the same way Phao, in the play of Sapho and Phao, is
resigned to live for ever in love with the unattainable beauty and
greatness of Sapho, though Sapho, through the influence of

156

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP, VIL

Venus, once returned this love. " O Sapho, thou hast Cupid in
thy arms, I in my heart: thou kissest him for sport: I curse
him for spite: yet will I not curse him, Sapho, whom thou
kissest. This shall be my resolution, wherever I wander, to be
as I were ever kneeling before Sapho, my loyalty unspotted
though' unrewarded. With as little malice will I go to my grave,
as I did lie withal in my cradle. My life shall be spent in
sighing and wishing : the one for my bad fortune, the other for
Sapho's good."
But beyond these faint and rather affected suggestions of a
sincere and noble chivalry, which Lyly gives in his Conceits, his
influence on the drama was purely external. Not only did he
make attention to literary externals obligatory on the dramatist,
but he made popular the custom of writing dramas in prose
instead of in the customary jingling rhyming verses.
His
play of Canvpaspe, slight in plot, being concerned merely with
the loves of Alexander and Apelles for the captive maid Campaspe, probably did much for the popularisation of prose for
dramatic expression,—Lyly, by his numerous conceits, endeavouring to make it as impressive and as harmonious as rhymed
verse, in the same way as Marlowe, by "his high astounding
terms," endeavoured to make his hearers forget the absence of
rhyme.
With the works of Kyd, Peele, Greene, and Lodge, begin the
robuster and more original form of the drama. The nation had
passed through the stirring political struggles of the Reformation
ending in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and had begun to
realise her national strength and unity. A period of comparative
calm had followed a period of intense excitement. The nation was
still conscious of the necessity of showing a united front, but
after 1588 it was on the aggressive against its enemies. The
struggle still continued; it was exciting, but not deadly or precarious enough to absorb all the energies of the nation. Dramatic
art reflected the excitement of national life.
This early drama was indeed a drama of struggle; its tragedies were tragedies of killing and murder and bloodshed. The
stage at this time was as much beholden to hatred, revenge, murder, and suicide, as Bacon says it was to love. " Give me the
man who will all others kill, and last of all himself," says a character in Fletcher's Humorous Lieutenant; and indeed this, intended for a satire, was no exaggeration of the tendencies of a
hero at this period of the drama. Tragedy is a "minion of the
night." " To thee," says a typical dramatist of the time, through

CHAP, VII.]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

157

the mouth of one of his characters in a play which is a fit
representative of the dramatic tone of the time,
" I ' l l sing
Upon a harp made of dead Spanish bones,
The proudest instrument the world affords :
When thou in crimson Jollity shalt bathe
Thy limbs as black as mine, in springs of blood
Still gushing from the conduit head of Spain.
To thee that never blushest, though thy cheeks
Are full of blood, 0 St. Revenge, to thee
I consecrate my murders, all my stabs,
My bloody labors, tortures, stratagems,
The volume of all wounds that wound for me.
Mine is the stage, thine is the tragedy."

Comedies, says Kyd in his Spanish Tragedy, are fit for common wits :
'' But to present a kingly troupe withal,
Give me a stately written tragedy;
Tragedia Cothurnata, fitting kings,
Containing matter and not common things."
"Blood," says Charles Lamb, "is made as light of in some
of these old dramas as money in a modern sentimental comedy,
and as this it is given away till it reminds us that it is nothing
but counters, so that is spilt till it affects us no more than its
representative, the paint of the property man in the theatre."
Blood and murder and battle, and deaths of all sorts—the
" matter " of these tragedies—became thus things only too common. Greene and Peele, to become uncommon, had to seek for
tragedy in the comparatively uneventful history of heroes of the
Old Testament. But mixed with this conception of life as a
struggle, ending in a tragedy, are nobler ideals, nobler elements,
—the consciousness of being a great nation shows itself in the
interest taken in history. The admiration given to the Queen is
not now so much the result of chivalry. There is a patriotic
enthusiasm felt for her as the representative of the national
unity, as the head of a great country which had done glorious
things and had a greater future before i t ; there is interest shown
in the social affairs of the day; and lastly, there begins to be a
human interest given to the characters of the personages of the
drama: they begin to be real men and women; the interest of
their characters is often subordinated to the interest of striking
incident and startling situation, yet they represent men and

158

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

women upon whose characters circumstances have some effect.
Greene in his historical plays, Peele in his scriptural plays, Kyd
in his Spanish tragedy,—each made an epoch in the immediate
pre-Shaksperian drama. And these men had none of them high,
conscious ideas of their art. They wrote quickly, spontaneously,
uncritically; they led lives of the wildest Bohemianism; they
recognised no belief which had power over their conduct; they
exercised no self-control over their actions; their lives were subject to the greatest vicissitudes, " now strutting in a silken suit,
now begging by the w a y ; " they spent their leisure and their
wealth in fighting and drinking, generally dying in misery,
"lying down laden with many cares." No wonder that they
brought discredit on the stage,:—made it more disgraceful in the
eyes of the Puritans; no wonder that Nash, after Greene's death
and the publication of his Groatsworth of Wit, felt it incumbent
on him to write the highly reasonable but ineffectual pamphlet,
Why should Art answer for the Infirmitie of Manners. Greene's
miserable death in poverty, the result of the most wanton dissipation,—the publication of his advice " to those gentlemen, his
quondam acquaintance, that spend their wit in making plays,"—
his wish that they should exercise a better wisdom and avoid
extremities,—revealed the private life of the dramatists, and
seemed to confirm the Puritans in their hatred of the stage. " If
woful experience may move you, gentlemen, to beware of unheard
of wretchedness, I entreat you to take heed. I doubt not you will
look with sorrow on your time past and endeavour with repentance to spend that which is to come. Wonder not," he says to
Marlowe, "thou famous gracer of tragedies, that Green, who
has said with thee there is no God, should now give glory unto
his greatness : he has spoken unto me with a voice of thunder,
and I have felt he is a god that can punish enemies. . . . Young
Juvenal," he says to Lodge, " sweet boy, be advised; get not
many enemies by bitter words;" and to Peele, " Thou no less
deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing
inferior,—driven, as myself, to extreme shifts,—a little have I to
say unto thee. . . . Base-minded men all three of you, if by my
misery ye be not warned. . . . I know the least of my demerits
merits this miserable death, but wilful striving against known
truth exceedeth all the terrors of my soul." Poor Greene, with
his conception of a God that can punish enemies, was little likely
to reform his comrades : not till they felt the thunder of the
divine voice in the pressure of their miseries, would they seek as
he had done, a repentance which life could not test.

CHAP, V I L ]

SHAKSPEEE'S PREDECESSORS.

159

But even Greene in his dying moments is roused to professional jealousy by the remembrance of " those puppets, that speak
from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colors. Trust
them n o t : for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers
that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes
he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you :
and being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his own conceit,
the only Shakscene in the country."
This well-known allusion was probably called forth by jealousy
of what must have been Shakspere's success as a dramatist.
What was then most demanded from a dramatist was not the
invention of a new plot, characterisation, literary finish, and
elaboration, but quickness in execution, the capacity for dramatising stories and well-known legends or ballads, the quick
sense of what would look well on the stage, the management of
incident, and the grouping of character,—talents which no one
but an actor could possess. The dramatic profession was not at
this time looked upon . as an a r t : it was a trade—a business.
Dramatic authors in the pay of a company had to alter, to adapt,
to work with others, to arrange, revise; a writer of plays
working for success regarded originality as the last requisite.
Originality went for nothing, for a play passed through many
hands, and its authorship could rarely be distinctly assigned. In
a profession like this Shakspere could not fail to compete successfully with his contemporaries. We know that all through his
dramatic career he never cared to invent plots, generally borrowing them from some history or romance; and his wonderful
capacity for dramatising story, his capacity for adapting material
to the stage, his quickness, would without doubt enable him to
leave his contemporaries far behind. Greene's anger may have
been but a sudden burst of spite, for, as a rule, actors were
friendly among themselves; their co-operation was generally
smooth; the memory of their good fellowship is preserved in some
lines of Heywood, recording the nicknames by which they were
known to each other. Chettle, the publisher of the Groatsworth of
Wit, offered afterwards a liberal apology for his share in circulating
the libel,—" I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my
fault,"—and speaks of Shakspere's uprightness of dealing, his
facetious grace. There was no real discredit, as the dramatic
profession then was, in being a Johannes-fac-totum, for the stage
was a purely professional calling. Shakspere trusted his fame,
not to his dramas but to his Venus and Adonis and his "sugared
sonnets," as Marlowe did his to Hero and Leander. Only in

160

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. TO.

the field of poetry proper did they consider themselves as artists :
in the early period of the Elizabethan drama, till Ben Jonson
arose to fight his great fight against the principle, dramatists
were men of business with no artistic ideal.
Was it mere wanton desire to pun, or was it the bitterest
satire, that made Ben Jonson designate Kyd as "sporting'"?
Kyd's sport, as Mr. Ward observes, is indeed among " t h e
grisly horrors of death :" the one drama, to which he owes his
fame, belongs only too obviously to the blood and thunder
sensational epoch, before art had sufficient self-confidence to deal
with the commonplace. The scene of the Spanish tragedy is,
as the name denotes, laid in Spain, and the incidents of the plot
pretend to be from Spanish history. I t opens with the entrance of the ghost of Andrea, lover of Belimperia the heroine,
who had been treacherously slain in battle, but who has been
allowed to return to the sphere of action with Eevenge. With
great naivete Eevenge explains their connection with the forthcoming drama—
'' Here sit we down to see the mystery,
And serve for chorus to this tragedy."
Eevenge evidently ministers to Andrea's desires; and, as Mr.
Ward says, " results adequate to the wishes of the most resentful
shade are achieved "—
" Aye, now my hopes have end in their effects
When blood and sorrow finish my desires.
Horatio murdered in his father's bowTer ;
Yile Serberine by Pedringano slain ;
False Pedringano hang'd by quaint device ;
Fair Isabella by herself undone ;
Prince Balthazar by Belimperia stabb'd :
The Duke of Castile and his wicked son
Both done to death by old Hieronimo ;
My Belimperia fallen, as Dido fell;
And good Hieronimo slain by himself:
Aye, these were spectacles to please my soul."

Crude and unemancipated as this tragedy may appear, it gives
Kyd a high rank among Shakspere's predecessors, because it not
only brings us into the region of real human passion (the scenes
between Horatio and Belimperia, as Mr. Ward points out, being
done with tenderness and grace),—not only did it by its plot of
a play within a play probably suggest the episodes of Hamlet to
Shakspere,—but because it shows that Kyd had the power of under-

CHAP. vii. ]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

161

standing, even if he could not exhibit, the interest of the action
of incident upon character. The real interest of the play consists
in showing the effect of the murder of a son, Horatio, upon the
mind of a father, who, half mad with grief, slowly prepares his
revenge, working it out in the same way that Hamlet does his.
How far Kyd developed this power on his own account, or how
far he only indicated what was to become the truest and highest
interest of the drama, cannot be quite accurately decided. The
best and most spirited scene in the play—a scene where the force
of real passion is strikingly drawn—is supposed not to be by Kyd's
hand. Hawkins, blind to its merits, puts it in the notes of his
edition as having been " foisted i n " by the players; Charles
Lamb, who justly calls it " t h e salt of the old play," suggests
Ford or Webster to have been the author who made the addition.
Jonson, who took a decided interest in this tragedy, alluding to
it in no less than six of his plays, seems hardly capable of depicting the wild pathetic abandonment to grief of Hieronimo in this
scene. Some more "potent spirit," Charles Lamb thinks, must
have furnished it. " I t is full of that wild solemn, preternatural
cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy."
Hieronimo can think of nothing but his murdered son—
' * He loved his loving parents ;
He was my comfort and his mother's joy,
The very arm that did hold up our house,
Our hopes were stored up in him,
None but a damned murderer could hate him.
"Well, Heaven is heaven still!
And there is Nemesis, and furies,
And things called whips,
And they sometimes do meet with murderers."

"Villain," he cries, to one who implies that he is mad,
" thou liest, and thou doest naught
But tell me I am mad : thou liest,—
I am not mad :
I know thee to be Pedro and he Jaques,
I'll prove it to thee, and wTere I mad, how could I ?
Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murdered ?
She should have shone : search thou the book.
Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace
That I know, nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him
His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth,
Had he been framed of naught but blood and death ;
M

162

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

Alack, when mischief doth it knows not what,
What shall we say to mischief? "

He welcomes an interview with a painter, who comes to seek for
justice, his son also having been murdered—
" 0 ambitious beggar, wouldst thou have that
That lives not in the world ?
Why, all the undelved mines cannot buy
An ounce of justice, 'tis a jewel so inestimable :
I tell thee, God hath engrossed all justice in his hands,
And there is none but what comes from him."

"Was thy son murdered1?" he asks, and the painter replies,
" Ay, sir; no man did hold a son so dear."
" Hier. What, not as thine ? That's a lie
As massy as the earth : I had a son
Whose least unvalued hair did weigh
A thousand of thy son's, and he was murdered.
. . . Come, let's talk wisely now :
Was thy son murdered ?
Pain. Ay, sir.
Hier. So was mine.
How dost thou take it ? Art not sometime mad ?
Is there no tricks that come before thine eyes ?
Art a painter ? Can'st paint me a tear, a wound ?
A groan or a sigh ? Can'st paint me such a tree as this ?"
. . . "Look you, sir, do you see, I'd have you paint me in my
gallery, in your oil colours, matted, and draw me five years younger
than I am: do you see sir ? let five years go, let them go—my wife
Isabella standing by me, with a speaking look to my son Horatio,
which should intend to this or some such like purpose : ' God bless thee,
my sweet son,' and my hand leaning upon his head thus, sir, do you see ?
may it be done ? "

He is to paint him then—this son murdered—run through and
through with villains' swords, and the murderers, " their beards
of Judas' own colour," and then—
"Well, sir, then bring me forth, bring me through alley and alley?
still with a distracted countenance going along. Let the clouds scowl,
make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the wind blowing, the bells tolling,
the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock
striking twelve. And then at last, sir, starting behold a man hanging,
and tottering and tottering, as you know the wind will wrave a man, and
I with a trice to cut him down. And looking upon him by the advantage
of my torch, find it to be my son Horatio. There you may show a passion,
there you may show a passion. Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying,

CHAP, VIT.]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

163

' the house is a-fire, the house is a-fire :' and the torch over my head ; make
me curse, make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well
again, make me curse hell, invocate, and in the end leave me in a trance,
and so forth ?
Pain. And is this the end ?
Hier. 0 no, there is no end, the end is death and madness."
Whoever be the author of this scene, it still remains to Kyd's
credit that he could conceive, as the central interest of a play, the
development and play of character, and thus suggest such scenes
as this.
It is to Peele and Greene that the pre-Shaksperian drama is
most indebted for improvement in style and in versification. The
richness of language, the dignity, the freshness and sweetness
of Elizabethan English, was first foreshadowed in the dramas of
these two. It is true that they are often exaggerated and pompous ; that they have the defects of these qualities. Like all
Elizabethans they were very unequal, the inequality of their
powers being heightened not only by their wild irregular life,
but by the fact that they wrote for money; yet they gave hints
of powers which, if sustained, would have caused them to be
ranked in the first grade of artists. Peele's first work of importance, The Arraignment of Paris, was written in the unemancipated form and style. It was in rhyme; an ingenious turning
of the story of Paris and the apple into a compliment to the
Queen. Diana, who finally judges, takes the apple away from
Yenus and gives it to Elizabeth. Peele has enough artistic power
to prevent his verse from degenerating altogether into the ordinary jog-trot. At times it sinks below mediocrity, as in the truly
dull and moral speech of Pallas—
" To stand on terms of beauty as you take it,
Believe me, ladies, is but to mistake it;"
yet in other passages it triumphantly overcomes the tendency
that rhyme often shows to become merely a monotonous jingle,
as in the speech of Enone as she sits under the tree with Paris i—
" And whereon then shall be my roundelay ?
For thou hast heard my store long since, dare-say,
How Saturn did divide his kingdom tho'
To Jove to Neptune and to Dis below:
How mighty men made foul successless war
Against the gods, and state of Jupiter :
How Phorcyas' 'ympe, that was so trick and fair,
That tangled Neptune in her golden hair,
Became a Gorgon for her lewd misdeed.

164

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

A pretty fable, Paris, for to read ;
A piece of cunning, trust me for the nonce,
That wealth and beauty alter men to stones :
How Salmacis, resembling idleness,
Turns men to women all through wantonness :
How Pluto raught Queen Pluto's daughter thence,
And what did follow of that love offence.
Of Daphne turned into the laurel tree,
That shows a mirror of virginity :
How fair Narcissus, tooting on his shade,
Reproves disdain, and tells how form doth vade :
How cunning Philomela's needle tells
"What force in love, what wit in sorrow, dwells :
"What pains unhappy souls abide in hell,
They say, because on earth, they lived not well.—
Ixion's wheel, proud Tantal's pining woe,
Prometheus' torment, and a many moe :
How Danaus' daughters ply their endless task,
What toil, the toil of Sisyphus doth ask."
Sir Clyomen and Sir Clamydes, containing a character, Subtle
Shift, interesting in the history of the development of the Vice
of the moralities into the Shaksperian clown, is also in rhyme,
and in very bad rhyme. Unemancipated in plot, sensational in
incident, is the Battle of Alcazar, a tragedy whose interest turns
on this battle, which was fought for the possession of the African
throne, and in which an Englishman took part. Though the
versification of this play corresponds on the whole • to the incidents, and is as full of rant as the plot is of exaggerations,
yet, as Charles Lamb points out, there occur occasional passages
in which the height and fulness of the language corresponds
to the greatness of the occasion. His language has a touch of
that barbaric splendour, that "extravagant vein of promise"
of that master of "high astounding terms," Marlowe. Muly
Mahamet, driven from his throne, robs the lioness to feed his
fainting wife Calipolis.
" Hold thee, Calipolis, feed and faint no more,
This flesh I forced from a lionness :
Meat of a princess, for a princess meat.
Learn by her noble stomach to esteem
Penury plenty in extremest dearth,
Who, when she saw her foragement bereft,
Pined not in melancholy or childish fear ;
But as brave minds are. strongest in extremes,
So she, redoubling her former force,
Ranged through the woods, and rent the bleeding vaults
Of proudest savages, to save herself.
Feed then, and faint not, fair Calipolis,
For rather than fierce famine shall prevail

CHAP, VII.]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

165

To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth,
The conquering lionness shall attend on thee,
And lay huge heaps of slaughtered carcases
As bulwarks in her way to keep her back.
I will provide thee of a princely ospray,
That as she flieth over fish in pools,
The fish shall turn their glistering bellies up,
And thou shalt take the liberal choice of all; 3
Jove's stately bird with wide commanding wings
Shall hover still about thy princely head,
And beat down fowls by shoals into thy lap,—
Feed then, and faint not, fair Calipolis."
But Peele's genius reached its height in his play of David and
Bethsabe. I t is supposed that about this time plays on scriptural
subjects were popular with managers, as tending to show that
the drama could deal with subjects not exclusively mundane and
worldly,—that it was capable of treating serious subjects with true
dignity and earnestness. The scenes between David and Bethsabe
are creditable to Peele's power as a dramatist and a poet, to his
management of blank verse—
" Now comes my lover tripping like the roe
And brings my longings tangled in her hair ;"
but they did not much advance this object. The scenes really
impressive in their thought and execution are those between
David and Nathan—
" Thus Nathan said unto his lord the king :
There were two men both dwellers in one town;
The one was mighty and exceeding rich
In oxen, sheep, and cattle of the field;
The other poor, having nor ox nor calf,
Nor other cattle save one little lamb,
Which he had bought and nourished by his hand :
And it grew up and fed with him and his,
And ate and drank as he and his were wont,
And in his bosom slept and was to him
As was his daughter or his dearest child.
There came a stranger to this wealthy man,
And he refused and spared to take his own,
Or of his store to dress or make his meat,
But took the poor man's sheep, partly poor man's store
And dressed it for the stranger in the house ;
What, tell me, shall be done to him for this ?"
A n d t h e scene in which David p r a y s —
'' Thou power
That now art framing of the future world,
Knowst all to come, not by the course of heaven,

166

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

By frail conjecture of inferior signs,
By monstrous floods, by flights and flocks of birds,
By bowels of a sacrificed beast,
Or by the figures of some hidden a r t :
But by a true and natural presage,
Laying the ground and perfect architect
Of all our actions now before thine eyes,
From Adam to the end of Adam's seed :
0 heaven, protect my weakness with thy strength,
So look on me that I may view thy face,
And see these secrets written on thy brows ;
0 sun, come dart thy rays upon my morn,
That now mine eyes eclipsed to the earth,
May brightly be refin'd and shine to heaven ;
Transform me from the flesh that I may live
Before my death regenerate with thee.
0 thou great God ravish my earthly sprite,
That for a time a more than human skill
May feed the organons of all my sense ;
That when I think, thy thoughts may be my guide,
And when I speak, I may be made by choice
The perfect echo of thy heavenly voice."

Though Peele by no means always kept up to this level, yet
he will be distinguished amongst Shakspere's predecessors as
being capable of a style at once graceful, dignified, and impassioned, giving at times evidence of a self-control that could keep
feeling within moral and artistic limits.
Lyly in his Gampaspe had, by his introduction of Diogenes,
declared "his intention of mixing mirth with counsel and
discipline with delight, thinking it not amisse in the same
garden to sow pot-herbs that we set flowers." The same idea
probably occurred to Greene. A gentleman of the time, in
questionable verse, says of him—
" His gadding muse, although it ran of love,
Yet did he secretly moralise his songs,
xTor ever gave the looser cause to laugh,
Nor men of judgment for to be offended."
Thus Greene apparently always had in his plays a moral
tendency that did not show itself in his life. And the work by
which he is best remembered, and which he wrote in conjunction
with Lodge, A Loolcing-Glass for London and England, had for
its idea to warn London, through the mouth of Hosea, who acts,
as Mr. Ward says, as a kind of chorus, applying Jonah's injunctions, addressed to Nineveh, to London. It is evident, however,
that this moral purpose, unlike most conscious moral purposes,

CHAP, V I L ]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

167

did not deduct from the freshness and vivacity of Greene's style.
I t is for these qualities of spontaneity and grace that he is most
noted.
((
0 had I tears like to the silver streams
That from the Alpine mountains sweetly stream,
Or had I sighs the treasures of remorse,
As plentiful as Eolus hath blasts,
I then would tempt the heavens with my laments,
And pierce the throne of mercy by my sighs."
As far as facility and ease of expression go these lines might
have been written by Shakspere himself. Very impressive and
dignified is the lamentation of Jonah over Israel—
"Irreligious zeal
Encampeth there where virtue was enthroned,
Devotion sleeps in cinders of content."
And very direct is the warning addressed by the prophet Deas
to London—
" When disobedience reigneth in the child,
And princes' ears by flattery be beguiled :
When laws do pass by favor, not by truth :
When falsehood swarmeth both in old and youth :
When gold is made a god to wrong the poor,
And charity exil'd from rich men's door :
When men by wit do labour to disprove
The plagues for sin sent down by God above :
When great men's ears are stopt to good advice,
And apt to hear those tales that feed their vice,
Woe to the land, for from the east shall rise
A lamb of peace, the scourge of vanities,
The judge of truth, the patron of the just,
Who soon will lay presumption in the dust,
And give the humble poor their hearts' desire,
And doom the worldlings to eternal fire.
Repent all you that hear ! for fear of plagues.
O London, this and more doth swarm in thee :
Repent! Repent! for why, the Lord doth see ;
With trembling, pray and mind what is amiss,
The sword of justice drawn already is."
"Repent you all that hear for fear of plagues," is characteristic of Greene's morality. This is a work which, in its conscious
desire to teach virtue, is akin to Sackville's Mirror for Magistrates,
and Gascoigne's Steel Glass ; it makes the struggle, so rarely successful and so frequent with the Teutonic mind, to combine
entertainment and a sermon.

168

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

The least emancipated of his dramas, the one which clings
most to the old sensational ideal, is Orlando Furioso, in which, as
Collier says, he has tried " to compound a drama which should
exhibit an unusual variety of characters in the dress of Europeans,
Asiatics, and Africans,—to mix them up with as much rivalship,
love, jealousy, and fighting as could be brought within the
compass of live acts." Nevertheless the verse of this extravagant
play is in Greene's best manner, smooth and pleasing: he does
not so often tend to rant and pomposity as he does in the
Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, where incidents
as striking as those in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, seem to demand
some corresponding effort on the part of the language. But it
is in George-a-Greene, Pinner of Wakefield, a play which deals
with forest and country life,—with the adventures of George-aGreene, keeper of the penfolds belonging to the common lands near
Wakefield,—that Greene's powers of versification have adequate
stimulus; it has, as Mr. Ward says, the distinctive note of Greene,
a native English freshness,—" that air blown from over English
homesteads and English meads which we recognise as a Shaksperian characteristic, and which belongs to none but a wholly
and truly national art," . . . " i t breathes the spirit of the old
ballads of the Kobin Hood cycle."
In the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
we see, by the delicate and poetic compliment paid to the Queen
at the end of the play, that Greene could also successfully lend
his pen to the most courtly and Euphuistic uses—
" Apollo's heleotrope shall stoop,
And Venus' hyacinth shall veil her top ;
Juno shall shut her gilly flowers up,
And Pallas' bay shall bask her brightest green ;
Ceres' carnation in consort with those
Shall stoop and wonder at Diana's rose."

Lodge, Nash, Chettle, and Munday, all worthy, especially
the two first, to be classed among Shakspere's predecessors, distinguished themselves as much in the field of prose as in that of
the drama. Lodge wrote a pamphlet in Defence of Poetry, Music,
and Stage Plays, in itself not interesting, but noteworthy as
having roused the famous Gosson who, by his efforts against the
stage and art in general, was to rouse some one still more
famous, viz. Sir Philip Sidney. But Lodge's name is memorable as being that of the author of " Rosalynde, Fuphues Golden
Legacie, found in his cell at Silistra," a novel which gave Shak-

CHAP, vii.]

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

169

spere his material for As You Like It. His fame as a novelist
and a pamphleteer, and as a writer of pastorals, outweighs what
he earned as the author of a stirring tragedy of The Wounds of
Civil War, lively set forth in the tragedies of Marius and Scylla,
full of striking scenes and violent vigorous speeches. So, too,
the part that Nash, as a pamphleteer, took in defending the
stage from Puritan attack,—a line in which he found full scope
for his genius for invective, for his erudition, for his vigorous
rhetoric, for that wonderful style which could illumine any
subject,—obscures his work as a dramatist. Of his dramas we
have two remains, The Isle of Dogs, which was never printed,
and Summer's Last Will and Testament, the latter interesting
as showing how the old morality and allegoric ideas still
lingered on. It is something between a show and a morality.
Summer calls the other seasons before him, with their companions, such as Bacchus, Orion, etc. Chettle and Munday
both belonged to the lower order of dramatists. Chettle is
known as the author of the ghastly tragedy of Hoffmann, and a
Revenge for a Father, in which the hero says that the tragedy
he shall accomplish shall surpass those of Thyestis, Tereus, and
Jocasta. He is said to be the author of fifteen others, and to
have contributed to thirty-four more. Munday had considerable
fame in his generation. Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, alludes
to him as " the best plotter ; " he had evidently acquired such a
literary and dramatic reputation that he came under the unfavourable notice of Jonson, who could never feel at peace with
those dramatists who regarded the stage as their profession and
nothing else; he probably ridiculed him in the Case is Altered
as Antonio Balladino. Probably the praise of Meres in this
case was as indiscriminate as that he bestowed on Robert
Wilson, who, he says, "for learning and extemporal wit was
without compeer or compare;" for of Munday and Wilson
nothing remains to mark them in any way even as the equals
still less as the superiors, of their companions in this group.
The most striking characteristic of these men, as indeed of all
Elizabethans, is their versatility. Their works, like their lives,
show their varied interests and powers. To the Elizabethan
'' Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds
In the trenches for the soldier ; in the wakeful study
For the scholar ; in the furrows of the sea
For men of our profession ; of all which
Rise and spring up honor/'
Peele was an actor, probably a manager.

Lodge had tra-

170

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

[CHAP. VII.

veiled—had had experience as a soldier : he, Greene, and Nash
showed by pamphleteering the interest they took in social and
political affairs. In their works they reflect the full and varied
interests of Elizabethan art. But none of them had that harmonising power which turns versatility into genius. There was
yet, however, to come one artist, Marlowe, who, by the further
development of the powers hinted at in the work of these men,
was to make the position of Shakspere, in his age and in his
profession, a little less isolated.

CHAPTER YIII.
MARLOWE.

MARLOWE, b. 1563-64 ; educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at
Corpus Christi (Bene't) College, Cambridge; d. 1593. — Tamburlaine
the Great, before 1587 ; Tragical History of Br. Faustus, 1588 ;
Jew of Malta, 1588-90 ; Massacre of Paris, 1590 circ. ; Edward
II,
1590 circ. ; Tragedy of Queen Dido, prob. left unfinished at
Marlowe's death, and completed by Nash, prob. 1594.

MARLOWE is the greatest of Shakspere's predecessors; his work
comes nearest, both in form and in idea, to that of the greatest of
English dramatists. It may have been time alone that prevented
him from making still narrower the gulf that separated him
from his great contemporary; for Marlowe, born in 1564,
died in 1593. After that university training common to all
Elizabethan dramatists,—a training which gave enough knowledge
of classics to allow of their use as literary appendages, as mines
from which could be extracted illustrations, apt quotations,
strings of well-sounding names, etc.,—his life seems to have
been one of the wildest Bohemianism, ending in inglorious death
in some trivial quarrel.
" Unhappy in thy end,
Marley, the Muse's darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below,
If any wretched souls in passion speak."

Of the genius, of the very great promise, of that " wit lent
from Heaven," neither contemporaries nor posterity can have any
doubt. It was never obscured in his works by " those vices sent
from hell;" even Greene's solemn address to him in the Groatsworth of Wit—which begins by greeting him as an atheist:
"Wonder not, thou famous gracer of tragedies, that Green, who
has said with thee there is no God"—cannot convict him of
wilful and utter abandonment to a life of thoughtless dissipation. Marlowe was not like the Yanbrughs, Farquhars, and

172

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

Wycherleys of after-days, who felt at home and satisfied with
wickedness, and to whom life was no problem. Marlowe lived
the life from which at first there was no escape for the Elizabethan dramatists; he experienced to the full all the temptations
to which they as actors and artists were exposed, and which was
often the ruin of many eager emotional natures. But life to
Marlowe had many interests, personal and impersonal; it had
good sides as well as bad; it was not merely a thing to be
enjoyed with thoughtless self-indulgence, it was a problem in
itself; it offered food for a curiosity, both high and low.
"The History of Faustus" says Charles Lamb, "must have
been delectable food for a mind like Marlowe's: he loved to
wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach
the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that
fell from the tree of knowledge." But whether or not these
speculations are the rottenest fruit of the tree of knowledge,
the fact that Marlowe indulged in them proves that he had a
soul, and that it was unsatisfied. We feel that his wide and
active mind—interested in the problems of life and death, interested in human character, in the play of human emotions—was
undeniably a great mind, great enough, perhaps, to be modified
by and to assimilate experience instead of being entirely moulded
by it. We shall never know whether, like Shakspere, he would,
if he had lived, have succeeded in emancipating himself from
the necessary degradations of his surroundings as an actor and
dramatist; we can only guess from the true tone of power and
sometimes of dignity that distinguishes some of his work that he
might in time have acquired that self-control which would have
prevented him from being the victim of circumstances, and without
which the best talents and the best impulses both in actual
and imaginative life are wasted. He might in time have acquired
that deeper insight, that tolerance, which is only another word
for sympathy, which specially distinguishes Shakspere, and
which rarely comes save to those who have lived a long and
independent life full of experience. - Drayton, whose opinion
is worthy of respect, bears full testimony to his genius—
" Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had : his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear ;
For that fine madness still he did retain
That should possess a poet's brain."

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

173

And he had in addition to that " fine madness "—that unrestrained freedom of thought and imagination which often makes
a Bohemian life the only possible one for an artist—an understanding of high and deep passion, of aspirations which a debased
mind could never have grasped. Marlowe felt with Shelley—
" It needs not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err."
He knew perhaps " the varied agonies " of a spiritual remorse,
" t h a t prey like scorpions on the springs of life." He makes
Mephistopheles reply thus to Faust's question as to the bounds
of hell—
" Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it ;
Thinkst thou that I, that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand devils
In being deprived of eternal bliss ?"
Kemorse is the hell into which are plunged the souls of those
that have done evil; and although we may wonder whether it be
possible for the Archfiend to be a prey to this nobler sort of
torment (Goethe's Mephistopheles, for certain, never felt it), yet
we cannot doubt but that Marlowe had felt i t ; and we cannot help
feeling that with him it might have developed into a lasting
power over conduct, nobler than Greene's fear of a " God that
can punish enemies,"—that Marlowe, if he had lived, might have
been a rival to Shakspere in more than mere youthful promise.
We must not forget also, in estimating the value of Marlowe's
work, that he had much pioneering work to d o ; that he found
the stage more shackled by conventions, more oppressed by
barbarisms, than Shakspere; that both in choice of subject and
in versification Marlowe's energy was employed in working
reforms by which Shakspere profited.
Like Shakspere and all other dramatists of the time, he relied
for fame on his purely poetic compositions. On the poem of
Hero and Leander, of which, however, he only lived to complete
what forms the two first sestiads; on his translations of some of
Ovid's elegies, of which, unhappily, he chose the worst,—he
meant to rest his fame: but a more justly discriminating posterity finds that his fame has been earned as a dramatist, as the
capable artistic reformer of dramatic blank verse, as the author
of plays which first (if we except the Spanish tragedy) introduce
real interest in character, which, by the superiority of their sub-

174

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

jects and treatment, raised once and for all the dramatic level,
and "made it impossible for the Elizabethan stage to go back to
the bloody horrors and tame declamations of the early Shaksperian drama."
Yet Marlowe's first play of Tamburlaine belongs in plot to
the old sensational drama; it is in the introduction and treatment of really human and ordinary incidents, such as, for instance,
of the scenes between Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, that its superiority lies. The plot is made up of gigantic incidents and awful
events. Tamburlaine, originally a Scythian shepherd, rises to be
conqueror of the world. In spite of the tremendous occurrences
there is a certain monotony and lack of excitement in the play,
for against Tamburlaine nothing can stand : everything and
everybody give way, leaving him invariably the conqueror.
Marlowe has not the power of making his terrible world seem
real: indeed it would require the strongest and weirdest imagination to transport us back to this hideous past: for the most part
we realise Tamburlaine as we should do any monster out of a
fairy tale. Driving in a chariot drawn by two mighty kings,
the kings of Syria and Trebizond, he is represented to us as
scourging them and addressing them as " pampered jades," because they cannot draw more than twenty miles a day. " To make
you fierce," he says
' ' and fit my appetite.
You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood,
And drink in pails the strongest muscadel:
If you can -live with it, then live and draw
My chariot swifter than the racking clouds.
If not, then die like beasts, and fit for naught
But perches for the black and fatal ravens :
Thus am I right, the scourge of highest Jove."

This bloody-minded king, who, "without respect of sex,
degree, or age, raiseth all his foes with fire and sword," is described as
" Of stature tall and straightly fashioned :
Like his desire lift upwards and divine,
So large of limb, his joints so strongly k n i t ;
Such breadth of shoulder as might mainly bear
Old Atlas' burden. 'Twixt his manly pitch
A pearl more worth than all the world is placed,
Wherein, by curious sovereignty of art,
Are fixed his piercing instruments of sight,
Whose fiery circles bear encompassed
A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres,
That guide his steps and actions to the throne

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

175

Where honour sits invested royally.
Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion,
Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms.
His lofty brows in folds do figure death :
And in their smoothness, amity, and life,
About them hangs a knot of amber hair,
Wrapped in curls as fierce Achilles was :
On which the breath of heaven delights to play,
Making it dance with wanton majesty :
His armes long, his fingers snowy-white,
Betokening valour and excess of strength ;
In every part proportioned like the man
Should make the world subdue to Tamburlaine."

Verse of this lofty, haughty, not to say pompous strain—blank
verse, whose " high astounding terms " shall mark the metre and
render it impressive—is the fit characteristic of this sensational
tragedy. Only occasionally does Marlowe fail in sustaining that
grandiloquent manner which should match the majestic height
of the personages and occurrences. The King of Persia, tired of
state and its vicissitudes,—who wishes humbly to bury his crown
" in a simple hole," and indeed begins to dig with that object,—is
meant perhaps to contrast with the stately, all-conquering Tamburlaine ; but his mean figure and his mean language produce a
bathos quite grotesque and inartistic in its depth; the dispute
between him and Tamburlaine is a mean bickering, worthy only
of stage-clowns. But really excellent are the scenes where Marlowe leaves the stage conventions which bade the dramatists
treat of emotions and occurrences quite beyond their experience,
and comes into the sphere of real passion and emotion. With
characteristic Elizabethan genius, delighting in the play of unbridled feeling, he draws the scene of madness, when the wife of
Bajazet, the Soldan of Turkey, the tortured prisoner of Tamburlaine, insane with misery, commits suicide; and the scenes
between Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, when the great conqueror
has fallen a victim to a love touching in its strength and its
constancy, are perhaps the best in the play. Zenocrate also loves
him, and in order to marry him has given up her betrothed : when
she dies his grief is deep and excessive. He is furious when
Death thwarts him, robbing him of what he values more than
his conquests. After her death he still continues devoted to her
memory : he has her portrait hung before him—
" Sweet picture of divine Zenocrate,
That hanging here will draw the gods from heaven,
And cause the stars fixed in the southern arc

176

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

As pilgrims travel to our hemisphere,
Only to gaze upon Zenocrate."

Characteristic, too, of the age is the imagery with which
Marlowe adorns his allusions to dawn and to sunset. The
Elizabethans never tire of such metaphors: they use the same
over and over again. Marlowe speaks of
" The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven,
And blow the morning from their nostrils,
Making their fiery gate above the clouds ; "

and Marston of the " dapple grey coursers of the morn," who
" Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
And chase it through the sky."

But the distinctive value of Tamburlaine lies in its verse. It is
the aim of its verse—an aim not quite attained—which distinguishes it from among the ordinary sensational plays of the time,
and which marks Marlowe at once as greater than contemporary dramatists. By the pompous blank verse of Tamburlaine
Marlowe wished to work a reform : he wished to supersede " the
jigging verse of rhyming mother-wits." He makes, indeed, a
very conscious effort after dignity of language and " high
astounding terms " ; but he succeeded better than Lyly had done
in his attempt to supersede rhymed verse by " conceited " prose.
Marlowe first showed that blank verse had great possibilities : he
showed what might be its capacities in the direction of stately
march and measure, which should make it harmonious without
the technical help of rhyme. In Tamburlaine the verse only
gives indications of the direction of this reform ; it was pompous,
stilted, and, as a rule, sense and sound were exaggerated even to
rant. When Marlowe became more used to the style he had
consciously selected, the effort ceased to be apparent: it became
his natural and spontaneous manner. He was thus the founder
of a dignified and noble verse; he showed what were the capacities
of that ten-syllabled, unrhymed verse which Surrey had first
introduced in his translation of Yirgil's JEneid, which became so
splendid in Shakspere's hand, so sweet in the hands of Beaumont
and Fletcher ; and Marlowe's " mighty line " has become proverbial—it lends itself to the arrogance of Faust:
" Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistopheles ;
By him I'll be great emperor of the world,

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

177

And make a bridge through the moving air
To pass the ocean with a band of men."

I t lends itself to the passionate admiration of Faust when the
vision of Helen passes before him—
" Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topmost towers of Ilium ?
Sweet Helen ! make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies !
Come, Helen, give me back my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked ;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest.
Yea, I will wound Achilles on the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
0 thou art fairer than the evening air
Glad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele.
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour."

In the same way that the verse of Tamburlaine, though crude
and undeveloped, indicates the directions of Marlowe's efforts as
to versification, so in The Jew of Malta we find indications of
Marlowe's efforts in the direction of characterisation. But the
task here was more difficult, and Marlowe's failure was correspondingly greater. Marlowe seems to have begun with the idea
of making the Jew's character the great point and centre of the
piece; he seems to have conceived it at first as interesting and
complex• to have intended to develop it by the action of the
play, and to have failed. So great is the falling off in characterisation after the first and second acts, that it has been suggested
that only these were by Marlowe's hand—that the rest of the
play was written by some other and inferior dramatist. The
most likely theory, however, is that Marlowe set for himself a
task too difficult for his yet untried power of characterisation;
that he was struggling, perhaps unconsciously, towards a higher
form of art, but that habit and perhaps stress of time checked
him, and he fell into the lower and more familiar groove.
Barabbas, the Jew of Malta, is introduced by Machiavelli,

178

MARLOWE.

[CHAP, Y I I I

who is a favourite with many Elizabethan authors, as being a
convenient embodiment of fiendish ingenuity: this idea concerning his unmixed wickedness being as common as the equally
untrue one which regarded Italy as an absolute den of vice and
horror. His presence in this case was meant to show that the
Jew was no ordinary villain, but a human being who attained
his malicious ends by refined and polished ingenuity. The Jews'
ethics are short and simple—the reward of the just and the
upright is evidently not found by them in this world—
' ' Haply some hapless man hath conscience,
And for his conscience lives in beggary."

But no such inward obstacle stands in the way of Barabbas'
prosperity. An early scene discovers him in his warehouse
absorbed in the contemplation of his vast, multifarious wealth;
he is scornful of the " paltry silverlings " that the Samnites and
the men of Uz have given him in return for his Spanish oils and
his wines of Greece—
" Pie ! what a trouble 'tis to count the trash.
Give me the merchants of the Indian mines
That trade in metal of the purest mould.
Bags of fiery opal, sappires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard to pay, grass green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seldseen costly stones of so great price
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a caract of this quality,
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity.
This is the ware wherein consists my wealth,
And thus methinks should men of judgment frame
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade ;
And as their wealth increaseth, so enclose
Infinite riches in a little room."

The news that his ships have arrived safely increases his selfcomplacency ; he bursts into praises of his race, which has shown
itself so capable in acquiring the one good in life. The desire
for wealth he considers as a precious and special inheritance of
the Jews handed down from Abraham; its increase was the

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

179

blessing promised to them. Herein, he says, was old Abraham's
happiness, as it is now the happiness of his race—
" For who is honor'd now hut for his wealth ? "
The contempt of the Gentiles, the scattered condition of his race
he counts as nothing—
" Rather had I a Jew be hated thus
Than pitied in a Christian poverty.
They say we are a scattered nation—
I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.
There's Kirriah Jairim, the great Jew of Greece,
Obed in Bairseth, JSTones in Portugal,
Myself in Malta, some in Italy,
Many in France, and wealthy everyone :
Ay, wealthier far than any Christian.
I must confess we come not to be kings ;
That's not our fault : alas, our number's few :
And crowns come either by succession
Or urged by force : and nothing violent,
Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.
Give us a peaceful rule : make Christians kings
That thirst so much for principality."

Such are the self-revelations made by Barabbas at the beginning
of the play, and much might have been expected from the development of such a character. But this was apparently beyond
Marlowe's power. We soon lose interest in Barabbas as a character, and become merely startled by the changing incidents of the
play. Barabbas, with the other Jews of Malta, is to pay the
tribute demanded by the besieging Turks. He, however, manages
to preserve some of his wealth by secreting a hoard in a nunnery,
where, for its better protection, his daughter Abigail takes the
veil. By the advice of her father before entering the convent
she stirs up a quarrel between her lovers, two noblemen of the
island. They kill each other, and she, in a fit of remorse, kills
herself, after first confessing to a friar. The Jew, afraid that his
complicity in fomenting this fatal quarrel may be discovered,
asks the friar to whom Abigail has confessed, together with
another friar, to his house under pretence of wishing to become
a Christian : he manages to kill the friar who had given absolution to his daughter, and to throw suspicion on the other. At
last, however, the Jew is betrayed by a slave, Ithamore. By the
order of the governor he is thrown over the walls; but even

180

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

this cannot put an end to him—his fall causes him only temporary inconvenience, and he is taken prisoner by the Turks, who
are again besieging Malta. He offers, in order to save his life, to
be their guide into the fortress ; but thinking to better his position, he proposes to the Christians of Malta to deliver the Turks
into their hands. They are to be invited to a banquet, and it
shall be so arranged that the walls of the banqueting-room shall
fall in and crush them. The Christians apparently fall in with
his plan, but only in order that they may be at last revenged on
the Jew. The Jew himself is the only victim at the banquet. The
floor opens, and he is precipitated into a carefully-prepared cauldron of boiling lead below. He disappears with an oath, which, as
Mr. Ward says, is a fit conclusion for this drama of which he is
the hero. " The whole play," Charles Lamb says, "is one which,
a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners by the royal command, when a general pillage and massacre
of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the Cabinet. . . .
The Jew is a mere monster, with a large painted nose, brought in
to please the rabble." Thus degenerated Marlowe's first attempt
at characterisation. The powerful man of shrewd criminal ingenuity and Machiavellian frankness of the first scene becomes
a mere monster, who, if he had possessed one more accomplishment, might have played the part of an ogre in a fairy story.
The naive horrors and exaggerated vicissitudes of the plot connect it with the pre-Shaksperian and unemancipated drama, and
show how very far removed is the play from Shakspere's Merchant
of Venice. Marlowe's play has perhaps had some fictitious interest
given to it as being supposed to have influenced Shakspere in
his conception and treatment of the character of Shylock. Probably the play suggested to Shakspere the general idea of The
Merchant of Venice, but the merit lies not so much in the suggestion as in the fact that Shakspere could make so much out of
such a bare hint. The comparison of the two plays brings out
strong contrasts, showing the infinite superiority of Shakspere's
dramatic power. In Shakspere's plays the interest lies greatly,
sometimes wholly, in the characters : the interest of the plot is
generally subordinate. In The Merchant of Venice it consists
to a great extent in the characters of Shylock and Portia, in the
skilful management of their relations to the other personages of
the play, in the gradual working up and complication of these
relations, and their disentanglement at the close of the play.
In Marlowe's play there is not only deficiency and failure in
characterisation—the degeneration of a man into a monster—but

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

181

there is little ingenuity shown in the management of the plot :
it consists simply of a sequence of horrors without any inner
thread of unity. There are indeed superficial points of resemblance. The elements in the characters of Shylock and Barabbas
are the same. " My daughter ! oh my ducats ! oh my daughter ! "
cries Shylock. " Oh my girl, my gold, my daughter, my felicity ! "
says Barabbas at a like crisis, when his fortune and his child
disappear together. Both remark on the base uses to which
Scripture can be turned. " What! bring you Scripture to confirm your wrongs ?" says Barabbas, in the same spirit in which
Shylock alludes to the devil who can cite Scripture for his purposes. Avarice, cruelty, cunning, and revengefulness, tempered
by a certain amount of dubious paternal fondness, exist alike in
the conceptions of both Marlowe and Shakspere ; but in Shylock
they are combined with infinite delicacy and subtlety, while in
Barabbas they are massed together clumsily. Indeed, the human
aspect Shakspere has given to his Jew, so different from Marlowe's caricature, has suggested a theory which, though probably
unfounded, is yet a great compliment to Shakspere's dramatic
powers. It has been thought that in the person and through
the mouth of Shylock, Shakspere wished to speak up for the
Jews; that he was above the common prejudice of his time,
which regarded them as social outcasts of low morality and
fiendish cunning. But there is no external evidence, and certainly the play does not afford adequate internal evidence, to
prove that Shakspere had more sympathy with the race than
Marlowe; but his dramatic genius was such that he could not
conceive a character without making him real and living : his
conceptions were truthfully related to flesh and blood, and therefore he made Shylock a man, not a monster : he is a heartless
man and an avaricious man, but he is human, and as such he
has at times his share of human dignity. Shylock is routed in
the end, as was Barabbas, and Shylock claimed nothing but what
by right of contract he could claim. The moral, if there be any,
of both plays is the same—that poetic justice is in the highest
sense satisfied when a Gentile outwits a J e w ; but that of Shakspere is less crudely put. In connection with The Jew of Malta,
Marlowe's failure in the art of characterisation, ought to be
noticed Marlowe's greatest success in this art, the character of
Edward II. in the play of that name. Very different is this
tragedy to that of the flaunting and bombastic one of Tamburlaine. Lamb says : " The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty
in Edward furnished hints which Shakspere scarce improved in

182

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. V I I I .

Richard II.; " and indeed it is in this play that Marlowe comes
nearest to his great successor. His conception of Edward II. 7 s
character is subtle and complex, yet it has unity : it is well sustained throughout, and the internal struggle—the conflict of
various feelings in the mind of the weak but interesting Edward
—is depicted with art and with truth. Marlowe's Edward II.
is not only a forcible and Vigorous creation because it is true to
human nature; it is interesting also because it is historically
accurate. Shakspere's Richard II. is so very like him that we feel
as if Shakspere had been blind to historic truth, blind to the difference in character between Richard II. and Edward II., and had
reproduced, with that freshness indeed with which genius imbues
all it touches, the Edward II. of Marlowe. The historic Edward
II. was actually the weak, extravagant, aimless, pathetic, artistic
king that Marlowe makes him in his play; but not so Richard
II. Their characters were as different as were the revolutions
which followed their depositions. Richard II.'s faults were not
those of weakness and thoughtlessness, causing a revolution
resulting merely in a change in the person of the monarch—the
change from Edward II. to his son Edward III. Richard was
extravagant, guilty of favouritism and injustice ; but not because
he was thoughtless and pleasure-loving, but because he had a
distinct political purpose. He wished to establish a great despotism—to be a political tyrant. It was to this end that he
overrode the interests of his subjects—-that he made all national
interests subservient to himself and his needs. But Shakspere's
Richard II. is highly organised, sensitive, of foreign tastes, a
man who would have been charming in private life, but whose
likings and inclinations made him a criminal in the public office
in which he was placed. Such a king, according to history, was
Edward II., but not so Richard II. Marlowe, then, in his
Edward II. has the credit of being true not only to the facts,
but to the spirit of the past. He produced a character so real
and so striking that it stimulated and perhaps controlled too
much the conceptions of his great successor. Marlowe's success
in the treatment of this character makes one wish that he had
found out earlier that the objects most worthy of treatment
are the facts and characters of the actual past and present,
and not the imaginary characters, horrors, and ecstasies of an
artificial world which the youthful dramatic art of his time considered the only fit sphere for artistic talent. Edward II. is no
blood-and-thunder character, "desiring all others first to kill,
and last of all himself :" " music and poetry are his delights."

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

Gaveston calls h i m t h e " pliant king."
wishing to use h i m for his own ends,

183
" I m u s t , " says Gaveston,

" Have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please."
T h e favourite who, from no fault of his own, b u t because he
was an alien, was sure to incur t h e deadly enmity of feudalism,
is insolent to t h e barons already suffering from t h e royal neglect.
H e disgusts t h e m with his impudence, his luxury, his foreign
w a y s ; his very dress, with its attention to foreign fashions, is
a n offence to t h e m ; he wears
" A short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearls, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown."
W i t h t h e King, says young Mortimer,
" H e laughs from out the window
At such as we,
And flouts our train, and jests at our attire."
I t is Gaveston who brings on t h e first crisis of t h e p l a y ;
always it is t h e King's favourites who, b y their injudiciousness
a n d insolence, cause those vicissitudes of t h e royal fortune which
give to E d w a r d I I . so m a n y opportunities of indulging in picturesque situations. I n a tone to which t h e m i g h t y line of Marlowe,
somewhat chastened b y the self-control of m a t u r e r art, lends itself
well, t h e barons threaten t h e K i n g —
" M y lord, the family of the Mortimers
Are not so poor, but would they sell their land
Could levy men enough to anger you.
We never beg, but use such prayers as these."
These warriors, " stern of mood," angry w i t h their pleasureloving, Celtic-natured King, t a u n t h i m w i t h his neglect of w h a t
to t h e m was t h e most solemn duty, t h e highest function of a
king. H e has never been in t h e field b u t once—
" A n d then thy soldiers marched like players,
With garish robes, not armour : and thou thyself
Bedaub'd with gold, rode laughing at the rest,
Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest,
Where women's favors hung like labels down."
E d w a r d I I . m a y not have much sense of t h e duties or practi-

184

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

cal dignity of a king, but in theory he has a high idea of its
elevation and dignity. It was to him something great, mysterious, and intangible, that nothing could destroy. He might have
spoken the same wTords that Shakspere put into the mouth of
his descendant, Richard I I . —
" Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king."
In all things, says Edward II., they are different to private
men—
"The forest deer, being struck,
Runs to a herb that closeth up the wounds ;
But when the imperial lion's flesh is gored
He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw,
And highly scorning that the lowly earth
Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air :
And so it fares with me, whose dauntless mind
The ambitious Mortimer would seek to curb."
In a tone which has the exaltation befitting the delegate of
God, insulted by a faithless queen and a presumptuous baron,
and which yet at the same time betrays the half-conscious weakness of the man, he exclaims—•
" Full oft am I soaring up to high heaven,
To plain me to the gods against them both ;
But when I call to mind 1 am a king,
Methinks I should revenge me of the wrongs
That Isabel and Mortimer have done."
With all his sense of fine situations and the necessity of acting up to them, he is often childishly querulous and petulant.
" Tell me," he exclaims, when it is made obvious to him that
his deposition is desired,
"Must I now resign my crown
To make usurping Mortimer a king ? "
And at a later stage in the tragedy, when the baron's commands
are imperious, and he is ordered to prison : " Must," he says—
" 'Tis somewhat hard when kings must go."
At other times he makes an attempt to infuse dignity into
the situation : he bows his kingly head to what he assumes, for
the purposes of effect, to be a heaven-sent fate—
" But what the heavens appoint I must obey:
Here, take my crown : the life of Edward too . . .

CHAP. T i l l . ]

MARLOWE.

185

But stay awhile, let me be king till night,
That I may gaze upon this glittering crown ;
So shall mine eyes receive their last content . . .
Heaven and earth conspire
To make me miserable, here receive my c r o w n Receive i t ! no, these innocent hands of mine
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime."

And thinking that he perceives signs of sympathy in his audience
he turns to them—•
" . . . What, are you mov'd ? pity you me ?
Then send for unrelenting Mortimer
And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel,
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear. . . . "

In the last scene, when confronted with death in the dungeon of
Berkeley Castle, his self-consciousness and vanity leave him—
" Now sweet God of Heaven,"

he cries, when left alone with the murderers,
" Make me despise this transitory pomp,
And sit for ever enthronized in heaven ;
Come, Death, and with thy fingers close mine eyes,
Or if I live let me forget myself."

Edward II., with his mixture of dignity, sometimes real,
sometimes merely pompous and self-conscious, with the weakness
and pathos of an insulted and cruelly-wronged man, is a character that does credit to Marlowe, as showing that he could conceive that highest of all dramatic creations, a complex human
character. The course of the play too shows that he could preserve its unity, for Edward II. is a real human being, not a
mere bundle of inconsistencies: the contradictions in his character
are the contradictions that would exist in a nature moulded as
his was.
Edward II.'s soaring and groundless dignity is only another
side to his uncontrolled misery and weakness. His apparent
cruelty and disregard of his subjects was the result not of
deliberate tyranny, but only of his absorbing affection for his
friends—for those men of foreign blood whose natures were akin
to his (for Edward had his mother's tastes and inclinations : he
was English only in name), whose very presence in England was
an insult to his baronage.
" My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow,
Which beats upon it like the Cyclops' hammers,

186

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

And with the noise tears up my giddy brain,
And makes me frantic for my Gaveston.
Ah, had some bloodless fury rose from hell,
And with my kingly sceptre struck me dead,
When I was forced to leave my Gaveston.
Let Pluto's bells ring out my fatal knell,
And hags howl for my death at Charon's shore,
For friend hath Edward none but these, and these
Must die under a tyrant's sword.
Life, farewell with my friends."
When they are gone it seems to him for a moment thai? his
life, even with its remains of royal pomp, is worthless. " Father,"
he says, to the monk who comes to give him religious consolation,
" the life contemplative is heaven."
"Good Father, on thy lap
Lay I this head, laden with mickle care.
0 might I never ope these eyes again,
Never again lift up this drooping head,
0 never more lift up this dying heart."
The death scene of Marlowe's king," says Charles Lamb,
"moves pity and terror beyond any scene, modern or ancient,
with which I am acquainted." In the dungeon of Berkeley
Castle the King is left alone with those whom he sees have come
to murder him.
"These looks of thine can harbour naught but death ;
1 see my tragedy written on thy brows.
Yet stay awhile, forbear thy bloody hand,
And let me see the stroke before it comes,
That even then, when I shall lose my life,
My mind may be more steadfast on my God.
0 if thou harbour'st murder in thy heart,
Let this gift change thy mind and save thy soul!
Know that I am a king : 0, at that name
1 feel a hell of grief. Where is my crown ?
Gone, gone, and do I still remain alive ?
Light. You're overwatched, my lord : lie down and rest.
Ed.
But that grief keeps me waking, I should sleep ;
For not these ten days have these eyelids closed ;
Now as I speak they fall, and yet with fear
Open again. O wherefore sittst thou here ?
Light If you mistrust me, I'll be gone, my lord.
Ed.
No, no ; for, if thou meanst to murder me,
Thou wilt return again ; and therefore stay.
Light. He sleeps.
Ed.
0 let me not die : yet stay, 0 stay awhile.

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

187

Light. How now, my lord ?
Ed.
Something still buzzeth in my ears,
And tells me if I sleep I never wake ;
This fear is that which makes me tremble most,
And therefore tell me, wherefore art thou come ?
Light. To rid thee of thy life. Matrevis, come.
Ed.
I am too weak and feeble to resist:
Assist me, sweet God, and receive my soul."

But the play of Edward II., with its skilful treatment of
character,—with its fine verse, which shows, as Mommsen says,
" that Marlowe could sometimes attain a facility of blank verse
quite equal to that of Shakspere in his earlier works,"—was not
by Marlowe's contemporaries and immediate successors considered
as his greatest success. It required the perceptive genius of
Shakspere to appreciate fully a play which, in its conception and
treatment of character, was far beyond the dramatic understanding of the age. The Massacre of Paris is the very worst of
Marlowe's plays; but it was popular at the time, both because
it dealt with horrors, and because those horrors were recent.
Dido of Carthage, a play also popular with the age, in which he
is said to have been helped by Nash, cannot be said to hold a
high place in dramatic literature; " it is a very beautiful version
of the well-known tale of Dido's love for iEneas," says Mr. Ward;
" but more a dramatic poem than a play." Philips said that of
all Marlowe had written for the stage, " Dr. Faustus made the
greatest noise, with its devils and such like tragical sport." The
age required "tragical sport," and devils who attended the
human soul and eventually dragged it to hell were better even
than massacre and bloodshed. The deep significance of the
mediaeval legend of Faust, and the still more profound meaning
that has been given to it by Goethe, made a posterity, not so
anxious for sensational interest as Marlowe's contemporaries,
very critical of an artist who deals with this subject;
But no inner meaning in the legend was observable to Marlowe ; not even a German critic could evolve a moral lesson or
discover an attempt at the solution of a moral problem in the
play of Marlowe. It is simply the bare story that Marlowe has
taken and dramatised, and he has not done even that very well;
there is no characterisation in the play. Faust, Wagner, even
Mephistopheles, attract little personal interest. The dramatic
points are in the situations necessarily implied by the story, and
even the thread which binds these situations together, which
should make the unity of the plot, is loose and superficial. Some
of the scenes could be omitted altogether, as, for instance, the

MARLOWE.

188

[CHAP. VIII.

scene with the horse-courser, who pulls off Faustus' leg, to his
great astonishment; the scene where Faust and Mephistopheles
preside over the banquet of the Pope with the Cardinal of
Lorraine and the Friars. The stage direction at the end of this
scene,—" The Pope crosseth himself again, and Faustus hits him
a box on the ear, and they all run away,"—sufficiently shows that
this and the like scenes were introduced for the benefit of that
part of the audience now technically known as the pit, and were
attempts at that comedy of incident which every dramatic
author of that day thought himself obliged to introduce in order
to enliven tragedy. The play opens with the scene of Faust in
his study, soliloquising, like his more classic namesake, on the
futility of all branches of human study. Logic and economy,
physic, law, divinity, cannot satisfy him; but it is not because,
like Goethe's Faust, he has a soul which cannot be satisfied with
anything but life itself and its experiences : it is because he has
the comparatively vulgar desire to be omnipotent:—
1

' These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, letters, characters ;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of horror, and omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artizan !
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command : emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds :
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretch eth as far as doth the mind of man :
A sound magician is a Demi God."

Then Faustus, having in thought aspired to know the secrets of
the divinity, takes what Mephistopheles calls the shortest cut,
abjures the Trinity, and prays devoutly to the Prince of Hell.
" For," says Mephistopheles,
"when we hear one rack the name of God,
Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,
We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul."
Concerning Faustus' soul Mephistopheles has no difficulty—
" The word damnation terrifies not him,
For he confounds hell in Elysium."
" Go," he says to Mephistopheles—

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

189

"bear these tidings to great Lucifer :
Seeing Faustus has incurred eternal death
By desperate thoughts against Jove's deity,
Say, he surrenders up to him his soul,
So he will spare him four-and-twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness :
Having thee ever to attend on me,
To give me whatsoever I shall ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will."

Mephistopheles, then, by the arts of magic, by the help of the
powers of evil, i.e. of the fallen angels, who are always seeking
their revenge in the upsetting of God's laws, obtains for Faust
all that he desires for the space of four-and-twenty years. Apparently the wishes of his soul are to a certain extent satisfied
when he can play practical jokes on the Pope and a horse-courser.
Marlowe introduces none of the purely human interest that consists in a love episode such as that of Goethe's Marguerite and
Faust. Mephistopheles summons for Faust the vision of Helen,
the embodiment of all beauty, and Faust addresses to her those
celebrated lines which mark the height of Marlowe's powers of
artistic expression in verse of a sensuous kind. The want of
personal human interest in the story lowers to a considerable
extent the value of the play; and as Marlowe tells it, there is a
want of point in the narrative and its close. Faust's tragic end
appears unmerited: we do not realise what constitutes the
enormity of his offence: he does not seem to us to have done
much wrong : he is not like the Faust of Goethe, who, in willing
companionship with Mephistopheles, has poisoned for himself
and for others the best and purest things in human life. We
feel that the hell of this man's remorse, in its depth and in its
powerlessness, is but the fit torment for a soul that has made
such a wreck of life for others as well as for himself. But it is
otherwise with Marlowe's Faustus. The play is not lit up with
any spiritual or theological significance, which would have given
a deeper and more terrible meaning to the last scene. We know
that Marlowe had no religious or spiritual belief which could
have illumined for him this legend, and which would have enabled
him to render it to us more solemnly and with more dignity.
The last scene is, however, impressive: it is tragic with the
powerless struggle of Faust to evade his certain and quicklyarriving end—with the passionate cries of one doomed who can
look nowhere for help.

MAKLOWE.
11

[CHAP. V I I I .

Faust. Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually !
Stand still, you ever moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come ;
Fair Nature's Eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
0 lente, lente currite, noctis equi /
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
0, I'll leap up to my God !—Who pulls me down ?—
See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop : Ah, my Christ,
Kend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Yet I will call on him : 0 spare me, Lucifer !—
Where is it now ? 'tis gone : and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows !
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God !
No, no. Then will I headlong run into the earth :
Earth gape ! 0 no, it will not harbour me !
Yon stars that reigned at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,
That when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths ;
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven !
(The clock strikes the half-hour.)
Ah ! half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon.
0 God,
If thou wilt not have mere)7" on my soul,
Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood has ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved !
No end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul ?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast ?
Ah ! Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd
Unto some brutish beast. All beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements :
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engendered me.
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.
(The clock striketh twelve.)
0, it strikes, it strikes ! Now body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.
(Thunder and lightning.)

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE.

191

0 soul, be chang'd into small water drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found !
Enter DEVILS.

My God, my God, look not sofierceon me !
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly hell, gape not!—Come not, Lucifer 1
I'll burn my books.—Ah Mephistopheles !
{Exeunt DEVILS with FAUST. "

The chorus at the close of the tragedy in neat and polished lines
draws attention to its moral, an office which justifies to a certain
extent their existence, so much has this moral been obscured and
overlooked in the course of the play—
'' Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And buried is Apollo's laurel-bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
Faustus is gone : regard his hellish fall,
"Whosefiendfulfortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practice more than heavenly power permits."
" The services of Marlowe to dramatic literature," says Mr.
Ward, " are twofold. As the author who first introduced blank
verse to the popular stage, he rendered to our drama a service
which it would be difficult to over-estimate. No innovation
could have done more to preserve it from the danger of artificiality of form, which so readily leads to artificiality of matter,
to which the drama is at all times peculiarly exposed. . . .
His second service to the progress of our dramatic literature,
though not perhaps admitting of so precise a statement, is even
more important than the other . . . it was he and no other
who first inspired with true poetic passion the form of literature
to which his chief efforts were consecrated. After Marlowe had
written it was impossible for our dramatists to return to the
cold horrors or tame declamation of the earlier tragic drama :
the Spanish Tragedy and Gorboduc had alike been left behind.
' His raptures were all air and fire :' and it is this gift of passion
which, together with his services to the outward form of the
English drama, makes Marlowe worthy to be called not a predecessor, but the earliest in the immortal company of our great
dramatists."
Mr. Ward denies almost entirely to Marlowe " t h e divine
gift of humour, which lies so close to that of pathos." But

192

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

pathos, tenderness, and passion no one can deny to him, and he has
at times an insight into human nature which gives him possession of the true gift of characterisation, making him see that
the real tragedy of human life lies not in the struggle of the
human nature against the powers of nature, but in the struggle
between the nature and the will of the human being. In Faust
the human episode exhibited nothing but the struggle of the
human power against Destiny; but in EdwardII. he gives us that
higher interest which consists in following the struggle of the
inward life of a complex human soul. He was the first, as Mr.
J. A. Symonds says, to design tragedy on a grand scale. Even
in less creditable plays, where character was not a study but
merely a creation, he showed himself infinitely superior to preceding and contemporary dramatists. "Before Marlowe plays
had been pageants and shows. He first produced dramas.
Before Marlowe it appeared seriously doubtful whether the
rules and precedents of classic authors might not determine
the style of dramatic composition in England as in France:
after him it was impossible for a dramatist to please the people
by any play which had not in it some portion of the pith of the
characters created by Marlowe."
Marlowe was thus fit to be the immediate predecessor of
Shakspere. If Shakspere's career had been cut short as early as
was that of Marlowe's, there would have been a very little gap
between these two great artists. As it was, Shakspere lived to
mature and to dignify by self-control powers which Marlowe
was squandering and wasting by a wild and purposeless
Bohemian life, which could recommend itself only to his lower
nature. All those powers which we see in the germ in Marlowe's plays are seen developed and intensified in the works of
Shakspere's later and middle life. Marlowe is eloquent, and his
blank verse is powerful, but no passage of his comes up to the
stately and prophetic warning of the Bishop of Carlisle, on the
occasion of the deposition of Richard I I . —
" My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford's king:
And if you crown him, let me prophesy :
The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind confound :
Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd

CHAP. VIII.]

MARLOWE..

193

The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
0, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the wofullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent, resist it, let it not be so,,
Lest child, child's children, cry against you * woe!'"
Shakspere had outlived the bombast which generally mingled
with the stately lines of the more youthful Marlowe.
Marlowe is passionate, and can enter into the world of
feeling, but Shakspere excels him in the conceptions of the
youthful passions of Borneo and Juliet, and of the deeper and
more intense feelings of Othello and Desdemona. Marlowe had
a keen sense of the pathos in life, but he could not have conceived the intense and long drawn-out pathos of Hamlet's love,
wrecked by the purpose that life had thrust upon him. " I
lov'd Ophelia," says Hamlet, as he leaps into her grave : " forty
thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make
up my sum."
He could not have conceived the grief of Brutus, so quiet in
its depth and intensity, who replies to Cassius taunting him
with the futility of his philosophy—"No man bears sorrow
better. Portia is dead." It was Shakspere's sense of those
deeper currents of life which stir the surface of things but
little, that gave him his pre-eminence in the power of characterisation. Marlowe might have conceived, but he could never
have sustained, characters like those of Brutus, of Macbeth, of
Hamlet, where " t h e soul's tragedy" makes the point and
interest of the play. And immeasurably superior as Shakspere was in this, the highest branch of dramatic power, he
was no less superior in the minor and yet essential attributes
of a dramatist. The Merchant of Venice is only one example
among many others of a plot cleverly constructed and developed,
with its different threads of story running side by side, and then
all drawn together towards the end. Almost all Shakspere's
plays are examples of that instinctive and technical knowledge
of what constitutes an effective mise-en-scene—knowledge which
can only come naturally to an actor. And then, above all, in
addition to those powers which he possessed in common with
Marlowe, only heightened and intensified by a life full of
experience both of the stage and of the world, Shakspere
possessed the capacity for humour—that capacity which serves
to harmonise the incongruities and the trivialities of the world.
" It is a presence and pervading influence throughout his most
o

194

MARLOWE.

[CHAP. VIII.

earnest creations. This it is which preserves Shakspere from
all eager and shrill intensity: this it is which makes his
emotions voluminous and massive." It is this which helped
him to be so thorough and so sympathetic in his knowledge
and his feeling for the people in the world; it helped him to
understand and to sympathise with those things which, to souls
that are always high pitched, seem trivial and obscure.
In speaking of Shakspere from the point of view of the
history of dramatic literature, we are tempted to indulge in a
verbal roar of admiration when the great gap between him
and the dramatists of his age becomes evident. How great
this gap is, is only too evident to those who make a study of
the dramatic literature of the Elizabethan period. As Shakspere is superior to Marlowe in feeling, in thought, in characterisation, in knowledge of what makes a plot and effective
mise-en-scene, so is he superior to his many and justly-celebrated
successors. Shakspere can dramatise a story as effectively as
Beaumont and Fletcher; he can write lyrics as charming and as
musical as those of Fletcher; as the songs in As You Like It, in
Cymbeline, in Much Ado About Nothing, amply show; he can
conceive the spirit of history, and can take us back to the past
in a different but certainly in as true and effective a manner as
Chapman; as the Boman and English historical plays sufficiently
show; he has as high an idea of his art, and as much instinctive
moral purpose, as the excellent Ben Jonson; though happily his
genius could recognise no reason why it should pose as the
teacher of its age. It seems almost impossible to speak of
Shakspere without unconsciously depreciating the work of the
dramatists of his age. In one or more points some of them
approached very near to him ; but the important fact to notice is,
that from the point of view of what constitutes the ideal drama,
Shakspere in his work, taking it all together, was as much
superior to them as it is probable that he was in his personality
and his life.

CHAPTEK

IX.

SHAKSPERE.

Born at Stratford-on-Avon, April 1564; educated at the Free Grammar
School, Stratford ; married November 1582 ; well known as a dramatist
in London in 1592; returns to Stratford between 1610-1612 ; died
April 1616.
PLAYS WHICH SHAKSPERE WROTE WITH OTHERS.

Titus Andronicus, 1585-90 ; 1 Henry VI., 1590-91; Two Noble Kinsmen,
1612; Henry VIIL, 1612-13.
COMEDIES.

Love's Labour Lost, 1590; Comedy of Errors, 1591; Two Gentlemen of
Verona, 1592-93 ; Midsummer Night's Bream, 1593-94 ; Merchant of
Venice, 1596 ; Taming of the Shrew, 1597 (?); Merry Wives of Windsor,
1598 (?); Much Ado About Nothing, 1598; As You Like It, 1599;
Twelfth Night, 1600-1 ; All's Well that Ends Well, 1601-2 (?); Measure
for Measure, 1603 ; Troilus and Cressida, 1603 (?) ; revised, 1607.
HISTORICAL PLAYS.

2 and 3 Henry VL, 1591-92; Richard 111., 1593; Richard II, 1594;
King John, 1595 ; 1 and 2 Henry IV, 1597-98 ; Henry V., 1599.
TRAGEDIES.

Romeo and Juliet, two dates, 1591,1597 (?); Julius Ccesar, 1601; Hamlet,
1602 ; Othello, 1604 ; King Lear, 1605 ; Macbeth, 1606 ; Antony and
Cleopatra, 1607; Coriolanus, 1608; Timon, 1607-8.
ROMANCES.

Pericles, 1608 ; Cymbeline, 1609 ; Tempest, 1610 ; Winter's
1610-11.

Tale,

" A L L that is known with any degree of certainty concerning
Shakspere," says Steevens, " i s that he was born upon Stratfordon-Avon, married and had children there; went to London,
where he commenced acting and wrote poems and plays; returned

196

SHAKSPEKE.

[CHAP. IX.

to Stratford, made his will, died and was buried." The small
external evidence that is possessed concerning the facts of Shakspere's life has driven industrious commentators to purely
internal evidences for the construction of theories concerning his
life, his employment, and his character. The knowledge that he
shows in his plays of legal technicalities stamps him, according
to some commentators, among whom is Collier, as having been a
lawyer, or at least apprenticed to an attorney; Aubrey thinks he
was possibly an usher at Stratford Grammar School; Mr. Eoach
Smith has written a book on " t h e rural life of Shakspere,"
tending to show that Shakspere wras a farmer; Mr. Thorns inclines to think that Shakspere had experience as a soldier; Dr.
Farmer, encouraged by the two lines in Hamlet,—
"There's a divinity which shapes our ends,
Eough hew them as we will"—

thinks that probably Shakspere may have been a wool-stapler,
the last line containing an allusion to the ordinary practice in
the making of skewers used in this trade; another commentator
thinks that he was a butcher; another inclines to believe that he
may have been a surgeon; lastly, Mr. Grant White undertakes
to prove on the same sort of evidence that Shakspere was a tailor,
and thus consciously and ingeniously points the moral to be
gathered from these sort of investigations, viz.—that with reference to the actual practical life of a man, so many-sided emotionally and intellectually as Shakspere, with such a knowledge of
practical life and practical men, and at the same time such a
consummate dramatist, nothing can be satisfactorily determined
save on trustworthy external evidence.
Of this, unfortunately, there is very little. Shakspere was
born at Stratford in 1564. He was baptized on the 26th of
April of that year, but the date of his birth, which is generally
assumed to be the 23d, the same day of the month as that of his
death, it is impossible to fix accurately. His father was a wealthy
citizen of Stratford, probably a glover by trade, occupying the
posts of bailiff, alderman, • and magistrate, and connected by
marriage with the Ardens, a family belonging to the smaller
gentry of the county; and at the Free Grammar School at
Stratford Shakspere learnt his "little Latin and less Greek."
Then, from the time of his leaving school till 1592, there are very
few facts concerning him which can be regarded as definitely
established. One is his marriage in 1582 to Anne Hathaway, a
woman much older than himself, with whom it is the general

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

197

impression that he was not happy. It is supposed that two lines
in Twelfth Night, Act ii. Scene 4, are the outcome: of his unhappy experience—
"Let still the woman take,
An elder than herself."
He had three children born,—the first in 1583, the two second
in 1585. I t is this large space of time for which so many
theories have been invented to fill. His father lost money: it
was then that he is supposed to have taken to a trade. Rowe
has a story, grounded on doubtful and traditional authority, that
Shakspere had to leave Stratford because he was concerned in
deer-stealing, and had incurred the enmity of Sir Thomas Lucy,
the owner of property near Stratford.
Equally doubtful is
Davenant's story that Shakspere supported himself when he
first went to London by holding horses at the theatre door.
It is much more likely, however, not that Shakspere fled from
Stratford in disgrace, and sought London as a place of refuge;
but that, stimulated by seeing the Queen's Players, who came
to Stratford in 1587, he made up his mind to seek his fortune among the dramatists in London. There was probably
a splendid opening at that time for a clever and quick writer
and adapter of plays. The managers of theatres did not like
one play to run for more than seventeen days, and thus they
must always have in their employment men who, even if they
could not write new plays, were at least skilful in revising or
adapting old ones. "As a theatrical adapter," says Mr. v Ward,
"Shakspere taught himself the secrets of his craft;" and his
skill and his success in this line have abundant testimony given
to them in 1592, by the attack made on him in the Groatsworth
of Wit by Greene, who, in calling him "an upstart crow beautified
with our feathers," hints that he was unscrupulous in seizing on
materials belonging to other dramatists. It is impossible to
determine how far it was then considered honourable to borrow
or adapt the plays of others; but that Shakspere did not err on
this point, as a general rule, is amply corroborated later by Chettle,
who speaks enthusiastically of his "upright dealing."
To M. Taine's great astonishment Shakspere; became respectable, i.e. he raised himself above the wild Bohemian life
into which the dramatists of that time plunged, and in which
for the most part they remained till the day of their death. In
1597 Shakspere bought a house in his native town : in 1597-98
three Stratford documents, which have been preserved, show him

198

SHAKSPEKE.

[CHAP. IX.

to have been engaged in pecuniary transactions which showed
him to be a rich man : in 1608, on three occasions, he purchased
more property; and in 1605 he makes his last and largest purchase. But although his home was at Stratford his active life
was in London. According to a tradition,^ Shakspere, by the
means of his patron, Lord Southampton, contributed a very large
sum towards the building of the Globe Theatre, which was erected,
after the death of their father in 1594, by the sons of James
Burbadge, a fellow-actor of Shakspere's. Another and perhaps
more trustworthy theory, grounded on a document discovered
by Mr. Halliwell, states that the brothers Burbadge built the
theatre at their own expense, and " t o themselves joyned those
deserving men, Shakspere, Heming, Condell, Philips and others,
partners in the profits of that they call the house." However it
may be, whether it resulted from his skill as a man of business,
actor, or dramatist, Shakspere's life had success from a purely
pecuniary point of view. How far he was popular as an actor
cannot quite be estimated. The ordinary assumption now is
that he was a bad actor, but there is little foundation for this
view. In 1680 Aubrey recorded that he "acted exceedingly
well:" and the statement of the author of Historia Histrionica,
1699, "that he was a much better poet than player," or the statement of Eowe that he distinguished himself " if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent writer," are by no means
decisive proofs that his acting powers were mediocre. Chettle,9
in 1598, in Kind Hart's Dreme, referring to him in his capacity
of actor, praises him as " excellent in the qualitie he professes."
He was mentioned among the principal tragedians acting in
Sejanus, and as one of the principal comedians acting in Every
Man in his Humour.
Certainly when he wrote Hamlet he
had acquired a very fine and just critical estimate of what
acting should be. As an author he had probably suffered from
actors who belonged to Marlowe's school of tragedy: " If you
mouth it, as so many of our players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with
your hands, but use all gently: for in the very torrent and
tempest of your passion you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." But certainly only Shakspere's plays would require smoothness and temperance in the
acting.
The tragedies of the pre - Shaksperian school, the
tragedies of Marlowe and of Kyd, would require no such selfcontrol on the part of the actor. Bloody, sensational, and
unnaturally horrible in plot and language, they would need

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

199

actors who could rant and fume across the stage. The " high
astounding terms" of Marlowe, the speeches of the terrible
Tamburlaine, could be rendered by no actor who could not
fearlessly and without any regard for the control that art
demands, "bombast out a blank verse." For as Shakspere
was the first to introduce a deeper meaning into the drama
—to make the interest of a play depend not so much on the
change of incident and situation as on the deeper but quieter
currents of feeling and thought which stir the surface comparatively slightly—so he would require a new standard for
acting, the temperance and "self-control" of strong but complex
natures, which " i n the very whirlwind of passion acquire and
beget a temperance" that gives dignity to the character and smoothness to the action. Probably, therefore, Shakspere's acting, if it
was equal to his critical standard, would not be highly appreciated by his boisterous age, any more than the deeper meaning
of his plays was understood.
It seems almost certain that Shakspere's popularity in his
time was due to qualities which are not those for which we
principally value him. His contemporaries admired his capacity
for smooth and elegant versification. Chettle and Heywood spoke
of " the facetious grace of silver-tongued Melicent . . . the enchanting art of mellifluous Shakspere." Webster, in 1612, praising
him because of his " right happy and copious industry," places
him with Heywood and Dekker. Greene liked Hamlet because
of its tragical speeches: his best plays were probably popular
because of the murders and tragedies they included. Ben Jonson
was the only one of his professional contemporaries who realised
at all that the genius of Shakspere was something rare and great.
In those verses which pay a tribute to Shakspere's art, Ben
Jonson shows how ready he who had " subjected himself to the
most conscientious training undergone by any Elizabethan dramatist was to acknowledge the less painfully achieved greatness
of his friend."
I t is not surprising, therefore, that in his old age, between
1610 and 1611, Shakspere retired to Stratford. Although the
little town was now Puritanically inclined, and had requested
the "players" not to perform there, it must have afforded as
congenial surroundings to Shakspere in his old age as the
society of dramatists who led the ordinary Bohemian life, and
valued him merely for his "facetious grace" and "copious
industry." That he was thoroughly isolated from the narrow
life around him—that he had as much imaginative freedom in

200

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

puritanic Stratford as he had in the wider yet more thoughtless
life of London—is shown by The Tempest, which he wrote in
1610. Six years afterwards he died. "There is nothing," says
Mr. Ward, " i n what we know of the life of Shakspere to
interfere with the noblest conception we may be able to form of
his personal character and his conduct." "Was it," M. Taine
suggests, " that by the mere force of his overflowing imagination
he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing imagination; that in depicting passion he succeeded, like Goethe, in
quelling passion in his own case; that the lava did not break
out in his conduct, because it found issue in his poetry; that
his theatre redeemed his life; and that having passed by sympathy through every kind of folly and wretchedness that is
incident to human existence, he was able to settle down amidst
them with a calm and melancholy smile, listening for distraction
to the aerial music of the fancies in which he revelled."
All that we can conclude with regard to him is that he must
have had a great, strong, and magnanimous personality.
In
his interest in life, and in his sympathy with all that was human,
we find no trace of the bitterness of disappointed egoism. It
was not
" the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country,"
which made him cling to existence, facing its "sea of troubles;"
it was rather because through his life ran the current of that
strong and tender feeling which closes in his sonnet, those
lines of weariness and despair—
" Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a "beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captive i l l :
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone."

" His fame was left the sport of circumstances: his monument is in his works alone." From the Restoration to the rise

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

201

of German criticism Shakspere's fame was undoubted; but his
works were subjected to much criticism, sometimes of a very
unappreciative and unintelligent nature. At the time of the
Eestoration there was indeed Milton to speak for
" Sweetest Shakspere, Fancy's child ;"
but the popular estimate of Shakspere by this age, whose taste was
frivolous and foreign, is well illustrated by passages in the diary
of Pepys, who deserves some notice as a typical critic of this time
—r-"his nature," as he says, "being most earnest in books of
pleasure as plays." He thought Macbeth " a pretty good
play," and "a most excellent play for variety:" he was "mightly
pleased " with Hamlet, but he considered the Midsummer NigMs
Dream the most insipid ridiculous play he ever saw in his life.
So, too, with the Merry Wives of Windsor; it did not please him
at all: a n o part of it." Dryden applied arbitrary canons to Shakspere, and thus found him wanting, though he was not so
overwhelmed by eighteenth-century fashion as to condemn him
as utterly barbarous. To a certain extent Dryden had a sincere
admiration for Shakspere: he was not hopelessly crippled, as
were other critics of this age, among whom was Rymer, by
abject reverence for Aristotelian rules. But it was not till the
reign of Queen Anne, the so-called Augustan age of English
literature, that Shakspere's literary fame was firmly established.
In 1709 was published the first octavo edition of Shakspere by
Eowe; then came Pope's edition in 1725. Then about 1765
Dr. Johnson came forward as a critic of Shakspere; and though
under the influence of the Augustan age—though he could not
conceive of a poet greater than Pope—" though," as Mr. Ward
says, " he thought a merely neutral-tinted passage of Congreve's
superior to anything that Shakspere had ever written,"—he yet, to
a certain extent, anticipated the criticism of Lessing. " Whether
Shakspere knew the unities and rejected them by design, or
deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably
suppose that when he rose to notice, he did not want the
counsels and admonitions of scholars and critics, and that he at
last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have
begun by chance. As nothing is essential to the fable but unity
of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently
from false assumptions, and, by circumscribing the extent of the
drama, lessen its variety, I cannot think it to be lamented that
they were not known to him or not observed; nor if such

202

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

another poet should arise should I very vehemently reproach
him that his first act passed at Venice, and his next in Cyprus."
But it was not till 1767-69, when Lessing, in his Hamburger
Dramaturgie, laid down the laws of true dramatic criticism, subsequently followed by Coleridge in 1811 in his lectures on Shakspere, that the true literary position of Shakspere could be
estimated and established. He once and for all vindicated the
right of a true poet to emancipate himself from all rules. " The
artist of genius contains in himself the test of all rules, and only
understands, retains, and follows those among them which express his feeling in words. In other words, as genius varies,
so the application of rules must be varied : and it is only by an
endeavour to understand the intellectual life and development of
a great artist that the critic can vindicate his right to be heard
as a guide." He combated the idea, to which the French school,
led by Voltaire, clung so firmly, that the idea of the drama is to
enforce a moral. " The tragic poet makes use of a story not
because it has happened, but because it has happened after such
a fashion that he could with difficulty invent a better for his
present purpose. If he by accident finds this fittingness in a
real event, he welcomes that real event: but to burrow among
history books for the purpose is not worth his while. . . . On
the stage we have to learn not what this or that man actually
did, but what any and every man of a certain character would
have done under certain given circumstances."
Inquiry starting from this basis, the sympathetic and artistic
criticism of him by men who were artists themselves, such
as Coleridge and Charles Lamb,—the thorough and detailed
examination of his works by critics of that school who aim
both at acquiring a knowledge of the mind of the author,
as well as obtaining a more sympathetic and intelligent basis
for admiration of the works themselves,—has resulted in the
establishment of Shakspere's fame as the greatest dramatic artist
that the modern world has yet produced. This sort of criticism
has also put an end to that detailed and scholastic method of
inquiry which consisted in treating the works of Shakspere as
the Schoolmen treated the Bible, examining and quibbling and
building theories on isolated passages, viewing them with no
reference to the context or to their connection with the whole.
The spirit of Shakspere could no more be discovered by this
method than could the spirit of Christianity.
In noticing his numerous plays, so varied in their excellence,
it is only possible to be brief by taking into account one of the

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPEKE.

203

qualities of Shakspere as a dramatist, and that his most distinctive one, and the one which enabled him to make such an
epoch in the history of the drama, supplying so splendidly what
hitherto it had lacked. Mr. Ward says : " I t was neither in
diction and versification nor in construction that the progress of
the English drama owed most to Shakspere. A single word
must express its greatest debt to him and his greatest gift as a
dramatist. This word is characterisation. I t was in the drawing
of characters—which range over almost every type of humanity,
furnishing a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art—that he
surpassed all his predecessors, and has never been approached by
any of his competitors in any branch of the drama illustrated by
his genius. . . . The characters of Shakspere are the ideals of
this aspect of the dramatic a r t : and his power of characterisation
was to him a gift like the gift of Hephaestus to Achilles—it
made him not only the foremost among the Danai, but the one
invincible among them." It is only by studying in his plays the
development of this power that it is possible to estimate his true
greatness and to assign him his true position in the history of
the English drama.
In proportion as Shakspere grew older and his experiences
and his interest in and insight into life increased, his power and
range of characterisation grew also. Between 1601 and 1610,
only a few years before his death, he wrote his best plays,—those
in which he shows the greatest grasp, not only of the stage part
of his business, not only the greatest power of expression, but
also the highest power of conceiving and developing character.
Julius Caesar was written in 1601, Hamlet in 1602, Macbeth in
1606. These plays are the outcome of the deepest and most
intense period of his development, wThen his imagination, deepened
by personal experience of life, disciplined by the study of historical facts, conceived with intensity and truth the tragic personalities
and inward struggles of Brutus, Hamlet, and Macbeth.
But before he attained to the full exercise of his powers,
either in tragedy or comedy, a long period was spent in learning
the technicalities of his profession, and in understanding how to
treat and to develop the material of the drama. From 1588, the
time when his dramatic career may be supposed to begin, till
about 1593, he may be said to be acquiring the elements of his
art. Two plays are edited with the rest of Shakspere's which
belong to this first period in his dramatic career. These two
plays are Titus Andronicus and the first part of Henry VI. The
plot of Titus Andronicus consists of horrors on a grand and

204

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

Marlowesque scale. It is a type of the ordinary sensational
drama, against which Shakspere afterwards struggled instinctively
and unconsciously, as Ben Jonson did consciously and sententiously.
" I t is a tragedy of horror," says Gerald Massey, . . . " i t reeks
of blood, it smells of blood ; we almost feel that we have handled
blood—it is so gross. The mental stain is not whitened by
Shakspere's sweet springs of pity; the horror is not hallowed
by that appalling sublimity with which he invests his chosen
ministers of death. It is tragedy only in the coarsest material
relationships." Prof. Dowden says : " Notwithstanding strong
external evidence,—the testimony of Meres, and the fact that
Heming and Condell included the play in the first folio,—
it is difficult to admit Titus Andronicus. . . . If any portions of
it be from Shakspere's hand, it has at least this interest—it shows
that there was a period of Shakspere's authorship when the poet
had not yet discovered himself, a period when he yielded to the
popular influences of the day and the hour; this much interest
and no more." So too with the first part of Henry VI. The
plot offered opportunities for deeper interest, which Shakspere
later in life would have turned to some account. The interest
which might have been given by the clever management of the
character of Joan of Arc is entirely neglected. Throughout the
play the treatment of her character is on a level with the crude
and mediocre lines in which she introduces herself in Act i.
Scene 2. 1 Certainly if Shakspere had any hand in this scene he
1

" Dauphin, I am by birth a shepherd's daughter,
My wit untrain'd in any kind of art.
Heaven and our Lady gracious, hath it pleas'd
To shine on my contemptible estate :
Lo, whilst I waited on my tender lambs,
And to sun's parching heat display'd my cheeks,
God's mother deigned to appear to me,
And, in a vision full of majesty,
Will'd me to leave my base vocation,
And free my country from calamity ;
Her aid she promis'd and assur'd success ;
In complete glory she revealed herself ;
And, whereas I was black and swart before,
With those clear rays she infused on me
That beauty am I bless'd with which you may see.
Ask me what question thou canst possible,
And I will answer unpremeditated :
My courage try by combat, if thou dar'st,
And thou shalt find that I exceed my sex.
Resolve on this : thou shalt be fortunate
If thou receive me for thy warlike mate."

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

205

showed no sign of those powers on which afterwards his fame
was grounded. Scene 4 of Act ii. is supposed to be entirely by
Shakspere's hand. In the Temple garden the rival factions of
York and Lancaster pluck the red and white roses which for ever
after were to be the badges of the quarrel. Its undoubted
superiority to the rest of the play lies in the comparative dignity
and self-control of the language, in the impressiveness of the
dramatic situations; the small and comparatively trivial episode
of the plucking of two roses of different colours by the representatives of two different branches of the family, marking the
definite breach which was to widen out into a quarrel of such
great magnitude.
Warwick dimly foresees the significance of the quarrel—
" And here I prophesy, this brawl to-day
Grown to this faction in the Temple Gardens,
Shall send between the red rose and the white
A thousand souls to death and deadly night."
In the same tone, but having all the greater impressiveness of
maturer style and thought, is the prophecy of the Bishop of
Carlisle in Richard II, Act iv. Scene 1—
" Let me prophesy ;
The blood of English shall manure the ground
And groan for this foul act.
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind confound."
Concerning the authorship of Love's Labour Lost, written in
1590, there can be no doubt. It is a typical work of this earlier
and youthful phase, when he was " a clever young man," with a
brilliant and undisciplined imagination, expressing himself in
language which is elaborate with puns and conceits and metaphors. The plot is entirely of Shakspere's invention: it is the
result of that youthful form of reaction against conventional life
which consists in imagining a life led under unconventional and
ideal conditions—an ideal which generally ends in becoming the
most artificial possible.
The true Shakspere shows himself in the treatment of the
character of Biron. Biron is indeed a sort of anticipation of the
Jaques of As You Like It: he bears the same relation to the
story of the plot. Cynically and scornfully he falls in with the
ideal plans of his companions, reserving to himself the right of

SHAKSPERE.

206

jeering and scoffing.
ual objects—

[CHAP. IX.

From the first he objects to their intellect-

" Study is like the heaven's glorious sun
That will not be deep-search'd by saucy looks :
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
Those earthly godfathers of heaven's light
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining night
Than those that walk and wot not where they are."

He is scornful of their ascetic rules :—
"Young blood will not obey an old decree."

He jeers at love till he, at last, falls a victim to the charms of
the French lady, Eosaline. She sees through him—sees that his
criticism of life is not prompted by the disappointment of a
great soul, but that he is merely
' ' a man replete with mocks:
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,
"Which he on all estates will execute.
" a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools."

To give earnestness to this spirit, which is cynical for the sake of
being cynical, she condemns him
'• this twelvemonth from day to day
To visit the speechless sick."

After such experience of life as may teach him its depth and
seriousness, she may perhaps listen favourably to his suit.
In the Comedy of Errors, written after Love's Labour Lost in
1591, there is, as Steevens says, "more intricacy of plot than
distinction of character." The plot is, indeed, one merely of
incident taken from a translation of the Manoechmi of Plautus
and in it Shakspere proves himself to be no genius in the management of incident alone. "The denouement" says Steevens,
" is certain from the beginning, and the error which is the result
of resemblance is continued in the last scene till its power of
affording entertainment is entirely lost." For the plot of the
Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592-93) Shakspere is supposed to have
gone for some of the incidents to the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney
—for others to a pastoral romance translated about this time from

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

207

the Spanish; and thus we might suppose that he would also have
difficulty in managing a plot borrowed from such an aimless and
complicated source as this chivalrous novel. But although
some parts of the plot are crude and strangely badly managed,
the inner thread of unity to the play is given by the character of
Julia. She is, as Prof. Dowden says, " t h e crayon sketch of
Juliet." She is the first of Shakspere's simple, intense women,
who always preserve their dignity and refinement by dint of their
deep feeling, though, conventionally speaking, they overstep
bounds. Her simplicity and naturalness seem to give the tone
to the play. " I t is observable," says Pope " ( I know not for
what cause), that the style of this comedy is less figurative and
more natural and unaffected than the greater part of this author's,
though it is supposed to be one of the first that he ever wrote."
Her confidence and belief in the faithless Proteus is invincible.
She tells her maid Lucetta not to bear a hard opinion of him—
'' Only deserve my love by loving him."
And when she is convinced of his fickleness,—when, as the page
Sebastian, she is commissioned by Proteus to bear the ring she
had once given to him to his new love, Silvia,—her loyalty remains
unshaken.
' ' Because I love him, I must pity him.
' This ring I gave him, when he parted from me,
To bind him to remember my good will;
And now am I (unhappy messenger)
To plead for that which I would not obtain,
To carry that which I would have refus'd,
To praise his faith, which I would have disprais'd."

But to be true to herself, which is to be true to her love for
him, she must be false to the command which he, as her master,
has given her—
" I am my master's true confirm'd love ;
But cannot be true servant to my.master,
Unless I prove false traitor to myself.
Yet I will woo for him ; but yet so coldly
As, Heaven it knows, I would not have him speed."

Thus even in this first period, when he was learning the
elements of his art, failing often in the construction and language
of his plays, he showed interest and skill in the delineation of
character; he did not deal with the hackneyed characters of the
ordinary drama; he conceived them himself, drawing them with

208

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

simplicity and truth to human nature. But his systematic study
of character only began when he turned his attention to historical
fact as the basis of dramas. Circumstances would naturally
make him tend in this direction. In 1591 the political greatness
of England was firmly established and recognised by Europe.
In 1588 the failure of the Armada had practically put an end
to the period of cautious and defensive warfare against Spain,
that enemy of religious and political liberty. England could
now afford to be on the aggressive. The help given by Elizabeth
to the enemy of Spain, Henry IV. of France, the yearly expeditions against Spain, mark the beginning of that short period,
ending with the accession of James I. to the throne, when England's position was brilliant and dignified—when she took up
her stand in Europe as the successful rival of Spain. English
patriotism had been roused to an unprecedented extent by the
threatened attack of Spain in 1588 : not only Protestants, but
Catholics, forgetting the persecutions to which a Crown, fearful
of its political existence, had subjected them, rallied enthusiastically round the government with all the strength of their feeling
of insular independence. " It was no sacrilege in the eyes of
the brave Lord Howard of Effingham risking his life and spending his substance, to fire a broadside into the galleons which
bore the images of St. Philip or St. George on their gilded
prows." This great effort of conscious and active patriotism
had been crowned with success, and the comparatively brilliant
foreign policy which England had since pursued had kept
up the national interest in the political situation, and encouraged and stimulated patriotic enthusiasm. " In the popular
literature of the period was found the inevitable reflex of this
spirit—sympathy with the national history. It was the age
of Pericles to which Herodotus recited the glories won by Athens
at Marathon and at Salamis: it was the age of Frederick the
Great in which (much to the cynical wonder of that prince)
the figure of the liberator Arminius once more came to have a
meaning for the German nation. And so the great national age
of the latter half of Elizabeth's reign was in truth a golden time
for the most directly popular expression of the nation's historic
sense—the English historical drama."
The study of historical fact was of infinite benefit to Shakspere, disciplining his imagination by making him adhere strictly
to the facts of actual practical life; but it was not care for his
mental development, as some German commentators would seem
to imply, which made him seek for his plots in the chronicles of

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

209

Holmshed and Grafton. It was the stimulus of patriotism,
probably the feeling that such work would be a professional
success, that induced him to study the history of England's
past. But it was not the political or national movements of
the past which excited him; he made no attempt to seize the
spirit of the time, as it showed itself in political crises; it was
the study of the characters of those Englishmen who had been
placed in prominent positions that interested him. It was in
following minutely the details of the success or failure of these
men that he employed his a r t : and he did this, with few exceptions, with great accuracy. It is because he was so true to
historic fact, and therefore to human nature in these studies,
that " lessons " have been drawn from the success or failure of
his heroes. But of these " lessons " the dramatist himself was
unconscious : he was simply interested,—what he wished to communicate was his interest in the lives and fates of these men. His
historical plays are divided by Prof. Dowden into two groups :
first, that including studies of kingly weakness; secondly, that
including studies of kingly strength. To the first group belongs
the character of Henry VI. It is strange that Shakspere should
care to study Henry VI. There was in him " no vigorous basis
of manhood . . . he was unworthy to be a king, utterly insensible as he was to his large responsibilities and privileges of
his place . . . his supreme concern was to remain blameless."
Such as he was, however, Shakspere faithfully depicts him,—a
man incapable of action, cowering beneath the insults of his wife,
the slave of a morbid, over-sensitive conscience, anxious to wear
"The whiteflowerof a blameless life,"
thinking that he will reach it by leading the narrowed life of a
monk, neglectful of all the duties that his high position thrust
upon him.
Shakspere studied a very different character in Richard IIL
" I am determined to prove a villain," says Bichard in the first
scene,—a determination to which his subsequent conduct proves
him to be faithful. The personality of Bichard III. lends itself
to that rather crude artistic characterisation of which Marlowe
is the master, and which Shakspere, in this play, to a certain
extent, imitates. " As in the plays of Marlowe, there is here one
dominant figure distinguished by a few strongly marked and
inordinately developed qualities. There is in the characterisation
no mystery, but much of a daemonic intensity." But Shakspere
makes his Bichard III. no mere abnormal monster, no fiend in
p

210

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

human shape. We are made to admire, as Prof. Dowden points
out, the tremendous power of intellect and the energy of will
by which he makes all obstacles give way before him. Only just
before his defeat and death, when the ghosts of his past rise up
before him, does he experience a momentary weakness, which
throws a gleam of pathos over his character, hardened by so
many crimes.
" I shall despair ; there is no creature loves me ;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me."
Eichard III. is the stern, determined villain; John is the
weak, cowardly villain, arrogant, blustering, and cruel, with the
will to be wicked, but shrinking from cowardice, not from principle from the means, unwilling to bear the responsibility of his
evil deeds.
" Had'st thou but shook thy head or made a pause,"
he says to Hubert, referring to Arthur's death,
" When I spake darkly what I purposed,
Or tnrn'd an eye of doubt upon my face,
As bid me tell my tale in express words,
Deep shame had struck me dumb, made me break off,
And those thy fears might have wrought fears on me."
Thus he strives to lay the supposed murder of Arthur on Hubert's
shoulders.
Henry V. is Shakspere's ideal king, his conception of a
national sovereign. He does not bow before him with the servile
loyalty of a later age that believed in the divine right of royalty.
Henry Y. mixes as a common soldier with common soldiers
before the battle of Agincourt. " I think the king is but a man,
as I am," he says to Bates, . . . "all his senses have but human
conditions." The essence of kingship does not lie
" in the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The inter-tissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,"
but in its great responsibilities, its heavy duties. But the
character of Henry V. is not, on the whole, one of Shakspere's
great successes in characterisation. In the play of Henry IV.,
in both parts of which the chief interest is centred on the Prince
and FalstafT, and not on the cautious unenthusiastic monarch,
the character of Henry is wrenched, as it were, from its natural

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

211

and historical position by Shakspere's endeavour to make it
appear as if he held aloof in his heart from the follies of his
companions, only participating in them for the sake of experience, and in order to make, hereafter, an effective impression on
his people.
" I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness ;
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
"Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle."
Shakspere thus would make him to inherit his father's judgment and cold prudence. He also had aimed at impressiveness
by the management of his presence. " Had I so lavish of my
presence been," he says to his son, rebuking him of his follies in
public places,
" So common hackneyed in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But, like a comet, 1 was wonder'd at."
But had Henry V. inherited his father's petty worldly wisdom,
he could not have led with so much abandon that life in which
Pistol and Falstaff considered him as their comrade; he could
not in afterlife have become the dignified and massively enthusiastic king Shakspere represents him as being. One is surprised
in this case that Shakspere did not remain true to the facts of
human nature and of history, allowing him to sow his wild
oats in earnest, to be sobered in later life by the consciousness
of great and splendid responsibilities.
There are other striking inconsistencies in the character of
Shakspere's Henry Y. King Henry, who, with words tinged
with wide and philosophic reflectiveness, rebukes the conspirators,
Scroop and Cambridge—
'' What shall I say to thee, lord Scroop ? thou cruel,
Ingrateful, savage, and inhuman creature !
Thou that didst bear the key of all my counsels,

212

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

Such and so finely boulted didst thou seem :
And thus thy fault hath left a kind of blot,
To mark the full-fraught man, and best endued,
"With some suspicion"—

who knows how to inspire his followers with the deepest enthusiasm for himself and his cause, who feels deeply the great
duties and privileges of his office,—is utterly lost in the scene of
courtship, when he pays his addresses to Katharine of France.
" H e has here," says Dr. Johnson, "neither the vivacity of Hal
nor the grandeur of Henry." He certainly has not the dignity of
Henry, but there is certainly an ill-timed reminiscence in his
manner of the boisterous roughness of his later days. "If I
could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into my saddle with
my armour on my back, under the correction of bragging, be it
spoken I should quickly leap into a wife. . . . And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and uncoined honesty;
for he perforce must do thee right, because he hath not the gift
to woo in other places. For these fellows of infinite tongue, that
can rhyme themselves into ladies' favors, they do always reason
themselves out again." The scene in itself is amusing and
interesting; but Henry Y. at an important moment of his life
would certainly not recur to that former self which, according to
Shakspere, he had assumed with a definite object; if on this
occasion he had felt nothing, he would have been merely diplomatic
and respectful; if he had felt anything he would have expressed
it with Henry's accustomed seriousness and impressiveness.
Although, therefore, regarding Henry V. as a whole, Shakspere
has not been successful in giving unity to his idea of his character,
yet from the point of view of dignity and impressiveness of
thought and language, the plays in which he plays a part are
among the finest that Shakspere has written. They contain, too,
good specimens of Shakspere's humour. The relations between
the Prince and "that devil in the shape of a fat old man," who
haunts him, result in scenes which are among some of the most
amusing that he has ever written. Even Dr. Johnson becomes
enthusiastic when he speaks of him. " But Falstaff, inimitable,
unimitated Falstaff, how shall I describe thee, thou compound of
sense and vice, of sense which may be admired, but not esteemed;
of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested?"
It is in the creation of characters like this that the nature of
Shakspere's humour shows itself, proving how intimately bound
up was this humour, which Schlegel calls his "irony," with his
whole power of characterisation. It was not that sort of humour

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

213

which finds its expression in the classic method of comic characterisation, in the exaggeration of one particular peculiarity of a
ridiculous kind, so that the character becomes amusing by dint
of being a caricature, and therefore abnormal and to a certain
extent inhuman. Neither does it find expression in the comedy
of incident, in the professional buffoons, in the clowns that delay
the action " to set on some quantity of barren spectators to
laugh." He is never the slave of his sense of the ridiculous.
Had he been so, he would have made Falstaff purely humorous
and therefore a caricature; as it is, he mixes sense with his
foolishness, and a certain discretion with his cowardice. He can
never separate the humorous view of things from his insight into
and sympathy with the other side of human nature. He thus gives
to Falstaff, who is a character infinitely more amusing than any
of Ben Jonson's comic personages, his share of human interest,
which enables us to realise him as a man, and to a certain extent
to sympathise with him. Our feelings do not go with Henry—
when newly crowned he refuses to greet his old companion.
They are with the white-haired old jester, who, in spite of his
sins, has pathos as being a human being rejected by an old
friend.
When, however, Morose in Ben Jonson's Epicoene, a
character of much less dubious morality, is deceived by his
friends, we feel that they are only administering justice to this
tiresome embodiment of the silent " humour." Prof. Dowden
points out the momentary pathos that is thrown over Falstaff's
bad and useless life by the description of his end. " A? made a
finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child; a'
parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning of
the tide; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play
with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was
but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled
of green fields."
Shakspere is very successful in making interesting and
effective the character of Richard II., though it is evident that
he is not very accurate historically in representing as he does the
nature of this king. In his conception of this character he was
without doubt much influenced by Marlowe's play of Edward
II, and thus his Richard II. being like the Edward II. of Marlowe, who is the Edward II. of history, cannot be historically
accurate. He has the same sense of situations as the Edward
II, the same sense of his royal dignity, the same impatience of
advice. The play opens with the banishment of Bolingbroke,
affording a grand opportunity for the exhibition of the royal

214

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

justice and clemency. " N o neighbour nearness to our sacred
blood," says Bichard, "shall privilege h i m " : his sentence is only
relaxed from ten to six years, when Bichard, gratified by the
humble yet deprecating behaviour of his uncle Gaunt, makes it
an occasion for the ostentatious exercise of the royal clemency.
" Thy sad aspect," he says to Gaunt, " hath from the number of
his banished years plucked four away." When, however, Gaunt
on his deathbed attempts to reason with the King, to give advice
to him "who was not born to sue but to command," his dying
words excite Bichard's scorn and anger. He is " a lunatic, leanwitted fool, presuming on an ague's privilege,"—" daring with
frozen admonition to make pale the royal cheek." With the
opposition that is naturally excited by his misgovernment, his
idea of kingly dignity, of kingly office, grows higher—
'' Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king:
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord."
When the conviction is forced upon him that the breath of worldly
men can depose, " when all our lands and lives are Bolingbroke's,"
his attitude changes, and he begins to take an artistic delight in
the situation. He finds himself not imposing, but picturesque.
'' Of comfort no man speak :
Let's talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs."
The truth for one moment seems to dawn upon him—
" Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while :
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends."
It strikes him, too, for one moment that he is inadequate to
•^

" 0 that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name !"
and the next moment begs "for a little little grave, an obscure
grave." His self-consciousness and fondness for conceits never
leave him. He says to Aumerle—
"Shall we play the wantons with our woes,
And make some pretty match with shedding tears ?
As, thus :—to drop them still upon one place,
Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
Within the earth : and, therein laid,—There lies
Two kinsmen digged their graves with weeping eyes."

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

215

Even when he gives away the crown he will be picturesque—
' ' I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand.
"With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
"With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,

He asks for a mirror to see his face, whether it is bankrupt
of its majesty—
" Give me the glass, and therein will I read—
No deeper wrinkles yet ? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds ?"

If the present time cannot appreciate the greatness of his
tragedy, it will at least make a tale which will draw tears from
posterity.
" Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.
The senseless brands will sympathise
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue,
And in compassion weep the fire out :
And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black,
For the deposing of a rightful king."

Richard's weak nature, warped by vanity, will have pre-eminence at any cost. His is of that sublime selfishness, terrible in
its blindness, that can only regard things as they affect himself.
Richard can pass through the greatest vicissitudes of fortune
without profiting by experience, because utterly incapable of
realising responsibility, of recognising that there are in the world
other individualities besides his own towards whom he has duties.
His only objects of interest in life are his own feelings ; he makes
a study of his own circumstances and sensations, and his own
egoism suffices to make him the centre of the play. Skilfully
drawn, however, as the character of Richard II. is, well-developed
as it is by the action of the play, it is marked as a comparatively
early play of Shakspere's by the diction and versification. Fine
as the versification is in many passages, the lines are generally
endstopt, denoting that earlier period of Shakspere's art when he
had not yet gained that facility and flow of language, when
expression ceases to observe rules, but is a law unto itself. His
language is full of puns and conceits. Conceits are, indeed,
the fit expression of a character like Richard's, but Shakspere
makes even the gardeners to indulge in them; and the pun on

216

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

pardonnez-moi in the solemn scene between York and the King
on the discovery of the conspiracy, shows a surprising want of
taste, and an incapacity for seeing the fitness of things, of which
Shakspere is not often guilty.
At the same time that Shakspere was writing his historical
plays he was also engaged on his comedies. His brightest and
best comedies were produced between 1596 and 1601. It was
later—between 1601 and 1607—that he wrote those more serious
and ironical comedies, such as AWs Well, Measure for Measure,
Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps in writing comedy he found
some relief from the strain of the history plays and the tragedies,
in which he had to deal logically with the more serious issues of
life. His comedies are concerned essentially with the brighter
and lighter aspects of life. His comic art is not the classic art
of Ben Jonson ; his primary aim is not so much to excite laughter
and scorn as to give gentle and pleasant amusement—to give the
picture of a life which is different from and less serious than the
ordinary every-day life. What specially distinguishes his tragedy
from his comedy is that in the former, dealing with the deeper
currents of life and character, the interest he wishes to excite is
absorbing and intense; in the latter, dealing with the lighter
and more superficial currents of life, he wishes merely to attract
and amuse. Prof. Dowden's definition of comedy and tragedy
explains the nature of the difference between Shakspere's comic
and tragic productions. " Every embodiment of thought or of
passion or of will which passes considerably beyond the normal
standard is tragic, or contains within it potential elements of
tragedy. All embodiments of thought, passion, and volition
which fall considerably below the normal standard are comic, or
contain possible comic elements. Romeo is a tragic personage,
because in him the passion of love has grown supremely great,
and under its influence his external material life—the life of
limitation—is wrecked and ruined. Hamlet is a tragic personage,
because in him thought has developed itself in a way and degree
which is without suitability or proportion to this finite life.
Richard I I I . is tragic, because his will is unsatisfied by everrenewed victory, and still needs to wreak itself absolutely upon
the world. But Slender is comic, whose love of sweet Anne
Page is so faint a velleity that he is compelled to borrow all the
suggestions of his passion." In the tragedies it is the hero upon
whom all our attention is concentrated; in the comedies our
interest is mainly attracted, not by the characters who have no
" souls' tragedies," and who for the most part are too slightly

CHAP. I X . ]

SHAKSPEEE.

217

drawn to monopolise attention, but by the whole action of the
play, by the relations of the characters among themselves, the
history of which constitutes the plot. Shakspere's comedies belong, on the whole, to the romantic school of comedy. M. Guizot
says : " Shakspere's comedy is a fantastic and romantic work of
the mind, a refuge for all those delightful improbabilities which,
from indolence or whim, fancy merely strings together by a thin
thread, in order out of them to construct a variety of manifold
complications which exhilarate and interest us without precisely
meeting the test of the judgment of reason. Pleasing pictures,
surprises, merry plots, curiosity stimulated, expectations deceived,
mistakes of identity, witty problems leading to disguises—such
were the materials of those plays innocently and lightly thrown
together. It is not to be marvelled at that Shakspere's youthful
and brilliant power of imagination loved to dwell on such material as these, because by means of them it could free from the
severe yoke of reason—at the expense of probability produce all
manner of serious and strong effects. Shakspere was able to
pour everything into his comedies ; and in fact he did pour
everything into them, with the exception of what was irreconcilable with their system, viz. the logical connection which subordinates every part of the piece to the intention of the whole,
and in each detail attests the depth, greatness, and unity of the
work. In the tragedies of Shakspere it will be difficult to find
any single conception, any situation, any deed of passion, any
degree of vice or virtue, which will not be found to recur in one
of his comedies; but what in the one reaches into the most
abysmal depth and proves itself productive of consequences of
the most moving force, and severely takes its place in a series of
causes and results, is in the other barely suggested, merely
thrown out for the moment, so as to create a fugitive impression
and to lose itself with equal rapidity in a new complication."
In studying the Shakspere of the comedies we study Shakspere at play. He has thrown off for a moment his sense
of the responsibilities and serious meaning of life. He finds
satisfaction for his imagination in thinking of Snug, in his tender
care for the " ladies," " roaring as gently as any sucking dove,"—
of Titania fondling the large and clumsy head of the ass,—of
Eosalind and Jaques and the Duke wandering in the forest of
Arden,—of a confirmed bachelor marrying a beautiful shrew.
But his comedies also contain interesting suggestions of character,
though in comedy he never studies his characters, merely conceiving them distinctly enough for the purposes of the story.

218

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

Portia, charming and playful with her scorn of her lovers, of
the tipsy German suitor—
" I will do anything, Nerissa,
Ere I'll be married to a sponge ; "

dignified with the consciousness of deep feeling when she speaks
to Bassanio—
" Though for myself alone
" I would not be ambitious in my wish
To wish myself much better, yet for you
I would be trebled twenty times myself; "

Beatrice, tormenting Benedick, hiding deeper feelings under a
scoffing outside; Rosalind, pert and enterprising, pursuing
Orlando through the forest, half-ashamed at her own impulses,—
are all characters which Shakspere touches lightly, because further development might have brought out in them the elements
of tragedy, and they might thus have become unfit to people the
world of his comedies. In a mood tinged with melancholy
Shakspere had conceived the character of the morose Jaques ;
but Jaques is not tragic, because he is happy in nursing that
melancholy, that " most humorous sadness," which is different to
everybody else's melancholy, " compounded of many simples,
extracted from many objects." Shakspere will not pursue suggestions of deeper things so as to detract from the effect of the
whole. Shylock speaks what we feel is a bitter truth to Antonio
in that speech—
" Signor Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me."

He comes at times very near to deaths and killings and tragic
episodes ; but he is not afraid to use the materials of tragedy,
because he wrote his comedies in a mood in which the serious
view of life was for the moment impossible for him.
It was very natural that so many of the most interesting
sketches of character in the comedies should be those of the
women. M. Taine characterises all Shakspere's women as
" charming children who feel with excess, and love with folly.
They have unconstrained manners, little rages, pretty words of
friendship, coquettish rebelliousness, a graceful volubility which
recalls the warblings and prettiness of birds." To a certain
extent this is true: Shakspere's women are not indeed all merry
and amusing. Some are very sad, such as Julia and Juliet;
some are very tragic, such as Lady Macbeth; but all for the
most part have childlike, uncomplex natures. Shakspere does

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

219

not study his women as he does his men. He can conceive them
of all sorts—noble, heroic, faithful, perfidious, heartless, charming, and coquettish; but he merely conceives their characters,
gives them unity and life, and then leaves them : he does not
develop them ; he has not given us the tragedy of a woman's
soul; he has not interested us in their inward struggles ; he was
not himself probably interested in the problem as to what made
the difference between a Bosalind and a " shrew." It is for this
reason that the women play such a prominent part in Shakspere's comedies : the souls of his women have no history ; they
are, for the most part, associated with the lighter, happier, more
peaceful aspects of human life.
The series of Shakspere's tragedies opens with that of Romeo
and Juliet. He probably first conceived the tragedy in 1 5 9 1 ;
he probably revised it again in 1597, in that earlier and more
youthful period, when the story and its surroundings would
prove irresistibly attractive to him. The moonlit evenings,
calm and still with the heat of an Italian summer; the passionate boy and girl, whose young vigorous love is clouded
by the fatal shade of an ancient feud, the ghost of the past,
which hangs over them, pointing, as it were, to their tragic
destiny,—would stir his young and romantic imagination. The
atmosphere of Italy, the sense of the youth and the southern
nature of the lovers, must be imparted in order that the play
may have charm and reality, in order that we may understand
the intensity of Juliet's sudden passion, and the childlike way in
which she abandons herself to it. Juliet is far the most interesting of the two lovers. Borneo is a youth following the
fashion of Italian chivalry, the aim of whose life is to be in love,
to whom worshipping and sighing at the feet of a mistress was
a necessity of existence. Before he saw Juliet in her beauty,
which hung
1
' upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear,"

he had served the pale and scornful Bosalind. He is far less
simple and natural than Juliet; he can ponder on the delights
of love when Juliet's voice is calling to him; he can draw
analogies between lovers, schoolboys and their books, when
Juliet has just parted from him. This tragedy cannot claim
to stand on a level with the later tragedies of Shakspere. I t
has indeed a great charm, but it has not the deeper interest of
those that he conceived in his mature years. Its charm is that
of a beautiful romance.

220

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

In Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Ccesar Shakspere shows himself at his best, both as an artist in the management of plot and
dramatic construction, and in the management of his characters.
He takes up in them, too, his most solemn attitude with regard
to the world. In the history plays he studied more, as it were,
the finite issues of life, the success or the failure of men in
practical life; he showed in them, by a skilful handling of
character, what were the inner causes of achievement or failure.
But in the tragedies he faces the deepest problems of life and
death, offering no explanation of their problems, because he feels
and realises them too deeply—too much from the point of the
individual struggler—to care to seek for impersonal solutions.
" I n his great tragedies," says Mr. E. D. West, "he traces the workings of noble or lovely human characters on to the point, and no
further, where they disappear into the darkness of death, and
ends with a look back, never on towards anything beyond. His
sternly truthful realism will not, of course, allow him to attempt
a shallow poetical justice, and mete out to each of his men and
women the portion of earthly good which might seem their
due i and his artistic instincts—positive rather than speculative—prefer the majesty and infinite sadness of unexplainedness
to any attempt to look on towards a future solution of hard
riddles in human fates."
Shakspere does not lead us—
" to take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies."

He does not want us to follow Macbeth after his death further
" Into that sad obscure sequestered state,
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul,
He else made first in vain."

Brutus, when he denies the great principle of his life, and gives
himself his death ; Hamlet, when he leaves the world, where he
had "drawn his breath in pain and doubt,"—disappear into the
" undiscovered country," and Shakspere follows them with no
speculation. He is sternly truthful: it must be enough for us
that they have lived and struggled and suffered. Some of them
have added " to the high tradition of humanity :" all appeal to
us because of their share in the deep experiences of humanity,
because they have known the good and the evil of life, its
temptations, its crimes, its sorrow, and its remorse.
Shakspere in his Boman plays draws the same interest from

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

221

classic history as he had from modern history. He studied not
the movements of things, but the inward life of the heroes of
a movement. In Julius Ccesar we feel no excitement in the
political crisis : it is the characterisation, specially that of Brutus,
which interests us—the career of a man whose life is guided by
the highest, most unselfish motives, but who makes the fatal
sacrifice of a true friendship to a false idea of duty, and is led
gradually into a course of action in which he contradicts all the
ruling principles of his life. At last he is driven to act
" Even by the rule of that philosophy
By which I did blame Cato for the death
Which he did give himself."

Brutus is so noble and so single-minded that he cannot see
through the complex villainy of Cassius : he is so Boman to the
backbone that he conceives it to be a duty to sacrifice his friend
to what he conceives to be the good of the state. His honour is
tied to the freedom of Borne; the state is his god: he makes of
it a religion, and as ascetics think it their duty to crush the
smallest earthly feeling they find growing in them, even if it
be only care and fondness for a plant or a flower, so Brutus,
conscious of the strength of his affection for Csesar, is more
inclined to listen to the promptings of Cassius when he suggests
that Csesar must be removed or he will ruin Borne—
" W h a t you would work me to, I have some aim,
. . . What you have said
I will consider : what you have to say
I will with patience hear, and find a time
Both meet to hear and answer such high things."

In Scene 1 of Act ii. Brutus, in a soliloquy, as involved in thought
as in expression, as significant in the history of this man as the
famous speech "To be or not to b e " is in Hamlet's, makes his
fatal decision—
" It must be by his death ; and for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him ;
How that might change his nature, there's the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking. Crown him ?
That :—
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins

222

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

Remorse from power : and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face :
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend : so Caesar may ;
Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel
"Will bear no colour for the tiling he is,
Fashion it thus : that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities :
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell."
Brutus's future career is t h u s u n d e r t h e dominion of this
necessity, which his decision has created. H i s tragedy emphasizes t h e fact t h a t t h e responsibilities of h u m a n actions are
indeed inevitable a n d far-reaching : " O u r deeds determine us as
m u c h as we determine our deeds." B r u t u s is hurried into conspiracy ; his n a t u r e rebelling at every step. H e revolts against
t h e secrecy necessary to t h e success of his scheme—
" 0 Conspiracy!
Shamest thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free ? 0 then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous image."
H e strives to keep both himself and t h e conspirators in remembrance of their sacred object—the freedom of Rome, for which
t h e life of Caesar is a necessary sacrifice. Their common enthusiasm for a noble object m u s t be t h e bond between t h e m —
" Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous,
. . . But do not stain the even virtue of our enterprise,
To thiak that or our cause or our performance
Did need an oath."
I t is no common sacrifice t h a t h e is m a k i n g : his feeling for
Csesar finds expression when h e speaks of t h e probable fate of
M a r k i\jitony after Caesar has fallen—
" If he love Csesar, all that he can do
Is to himself,—take thought, and die for Caesar."
" Pity," h e says to A n t o n y after t h e deed has been done, to
t h e general wrong of Rome, . . . " h a t h done this deed t o

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

223

Caesar. Mark Antony was a dear friend of Caesar's : but Brutus's
love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand
why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer,—not that I
loved Caesar less, but that I loved Borne more." Eventually, in
Act iv. Scene 3, comes the inevitable quarrel between Brutus
and Cassius. The immediate end of the conspiracy being accomplished, the divergence in their motives cannot long remain unnoticed : Brutus killed Caesar because he wished to save Borne
from the tyranny of one; Cassius because he hated that Caesar
should be that one. " Shall one of us," says Brutus,
"that struck the foremost man of all the world
Contaminate ourfingerswith false bribes ?"
By one false step he has linked his fortunes with Cassius—he is
inevitably associated with one who maintains his ascendency by
bribery and corruption. Caesar, less ideal, but with more practical wisdom than Brutus, understood and distrusted Cassius—
" I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much ;
He is a great observer and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. . . .
Such men as he be never at heart's ease,
"Whiles they behold a greater than themselves."
But Brutus is incapable of understanding the lower nature of
Cassius : after his anger has passed away he believes in him
again fully. But Cassius cannot fill the place of Caesar in his
heart; he still believes that he has done right, but the memory
of his violated friendship haunts him. Bemorse takes form in
the external world, in the dead figure of Caesar appearing to him
— " Thy evil spirit, Brutus." His courage and resolution leave
him. After the defeat at Philippi he kills himself.
"Night hangs upon mine eyes : my bones would rest,
That have but labor'd to attain this hour."
The play is wrongly called Julius Ccesar. Even Mark Antony,
with his passionate love for Caesar, "for the noblest man that
ever lived in the tide of times," is a far more prominent figure
than Caesar. The shrewdness and self-control of his famous
speech, the result of a settled scheme which no Boman could
have believed the pleasure-loving Antony was capable of forming,
entitle him to far more consideration than Caesar. Shakspere

224

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

seems to have wished to throw Caesar into the background, to
prevent sympathy being excited by his fall.
Only on a few occasions does Shakspere do justice to the
real greatness of Caesar's character. " Cowards die many times
before their deaths," he says, resisting the entreaties of Calpurnia—
" The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that Death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
And Shakspere cannot detract from the pathos of Caesar's cry,
as he sees Brutus among the conspirators : " Et tu Brute,—Then
fall Caesar ! " But the tragedy is the tragedy of Brutus, and not
of Julius Caesar.
"Character is Destiny," says Novalis; and although ,this
puts the case far too strongly, yet Shakspere could almost
have taken this sentence for his motto in the tragedy of Macbeth. It is indeed the theme of his tragedies, and nowhere
more strongly stated than in Macbeth. " By thy first step awry,"
says Roger Chillingworth to Hester Prynne, " thou didst plant
the germ of evil, but since that moment it has all been a dark
necessity." The mingled web of good and evil springing from
our acts is what Shakspere studied in the history plays : in the
tragedies, and especially in the tragedy of Macbeth, he shows
the intricate labyrinth of evil, in which, by a wrong deed, a
human being can become involved. In the tragedy of Macbeth
he shows the gradual steps in the downward career of a man
whose first crime, prompted by ambition, determines a future
career of evil thoughts and evil actions. Before he commits his
first crime the struggle with his better nature is hard and long.
"Thou wouldst be great," says Lady Macbeth of him—
"Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly
That wouldst thou holily : wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win."
To her Macbeth's compunctions are weakness : it is not that
she sacrifices nothing to gain her purpose : she has strong affections for her husband, for her father—" Had he not resembled
my father as he slept, I had done i t : " but there exists for her
nothing in heaven or earth which should prevent her from crushing these feelings in order to gain her object.

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPEEE.

225

" Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
Unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty ! "
She will not live a coward in her own esteem, letting " c I dare
not' wait upon ' I would.'" I t is implied that Lady Macbeth is
no stalwart tragedy queen, but a delicate little woman : it is she
who, when the strain is over,—when the objects of ambition are
reached,—becomes mad; it is she who is thoroughly unbalanced
by the memory of the deed: but it is Macbeth, of stronger
physical nature, yet of less determined, ruthless character, who
is haunted continually by a moral remorse, who implores " the
sun and firm set earth "—
" Hear not my steps, which way they walk,
For fear the very stones prate of my whereabout;"
who hears the voices crying " Macbeth doth murder sleep : Glamis
hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more;
Macbeth shall sleep no more."
The first step , has been taken: and further crimes have
become a dark necessity. Banquo has suspicions : therefore he
must be murdered: yet it is implied that Macbeth does not
desire this solely from fear. There lingers yet enough good in
his nature to make him feel rebuked in Banquo's presence—
" In his royalty of nature
Keigns that which would be fear'd."
But " Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill"—
" I am in blood stepp'd in so far,
That, should I wade no more,
Keturning were as tedious as go o'er."
Crime cannot altogether harden him : even his success cannot
quench that remorse and that weariness of life that grows upon
him. His better nature now does not struggle, " his eternal
jewel h^s been given to the common enemy of m a n : " but it
lives on in him, and makes him weary and disgusted with a life
that seems empty and purposeless.
" I have lived long enough, my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Q

226

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted foo]s
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle !
Life's but a walking shadow : a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more : it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Macbeth's nature was ruined by the purpose to which ambition urged him. The tragedy of Hamlet is the tragedy of a life
that was ruined by a purpose that circumstances thrust upon it,
which Hamlet, by the very strength of his feelings, by the width
of his sympathies, was unable to carry out. Suddenly life became to him full of one great responsibility, which forced him
to cut all the ties of his past life, to forego all his hopes of
happiness in the future : his will was not equal to the effort, and
thus we have the tragedy of Hamlet. " Eemember thee," he says
of his wronged father, whose ghost cries for revenge—
" Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there ;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmixed with baser matter."
Thoughtful and inactive by nature, " the native hue of resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," shrinking before
a revenge which is to destroy all the most cherished conditions
of his life, he vacillates and hesitates, and brings misery on those
he loves best without accomplishing his end. He takes leave of
Ophelia; " h e raised a sigh so piteous and profound, as it did
seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being." He must appear
to be mad, in order to deceive her and others,—in order to account,
without rousing suspicion, for the strangeness of his conduct.
" I love you not: get you to a nunnery." He tries thus to
conceal a love the full force of which overwhelms him at her
death. " I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers could not,
with all their quantity of love, make up my sum."
Life becomes too hard for him. He is oppressed by its
miseries and responsibilities. At one moment he curses the
Destiny that would force him to action : at another he laments
his nature that cannot be roused.
" 0, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,

CHAP, ix.]

SHAKSPERE.

227

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit ? And all for nothing !
Eor Hecuba!
"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her ? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have ? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing."
Conscience has made a coward of H a m l e t : " life is a sea of
troubles : " m a y it not be better to seek t h e rest of death than
to t a k e arms against t h e m * H i s will is p u z z l e d ; instead of
?
acting h e " u n p a c k s " his heart with words. " T h e last moments of
Hamlet's life," says Professor Dowden, " are well spent, and for
energy and foresight are t h e noblest moments of his existence;
he snatches t h e poisoned bowl from Horatio and saves his friend;
he gives his dying voice to Fortinbras, and saves his country."
I n these tragedies we find Shakspere a t t h e height of his
powers. Others of his plays, written about t h e same period of
his life, testify also to t h e fact t h a t his genius was in its prime.
Coriolanus, written in 1608, can be taken, as Professor Dowden
says, as forming a contrast in every w a y to Julius Gcesar. B r u t u s
sacrifices everything to his impersonal e n t h u s i a s m s ; Coriolanus
is t h e impersonation of egoism, of personal arrogance and classprejudice. H e sacrifices everything to his p r i d e — i t outweighs
his patriotism, and to gratify it h e deserts his country.
"Despising, for you, t h e city," h e says to t h e mob,
' ' thus I turn my back :
There is a world elsewhere."
One little touch of tenderness m a d e his life a practical failure,
b u t redeemed it from being a moral b l o t —
{

* 0 mother, you have won a happy victory for Rome ;
But for your son, believe it, 0 believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him."

228

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

Between Julius Ccesar and Antony and Cleopatra there are also
those points of connection arising from contrast. " In the one
an ideal of duty is dominant; the other is a divinisation of
pleasure, followed by the remorseless Nemesis of eternal law."
Antony is the slave of his desires, powerless to act, destitute of
self-control, under the influence of Cleopatra. Mrs. Jameson
speaks with admiration of Shakspere's treatment of this woman's
character. " Great crimes, springing from high passions, grafted
on high qualities, are the legitimate source of tragic poetry.
But to make the extreme of littleness produce an effect like
grandeur—to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like
power—to heap up together all that is most unsubstantial,
frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthlessness
be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from
the very elements of littleness,—to do this belonged only to
Shakspere, that worker of miracles. Cleopatra is a brilliant
antithesis, a compound of contradictions of all that we most hate
with what we most admire." In Othello there is the tragedy of
two simple and believing souls, whose lives are ruined by a being
who is the incarnation of maliciousness, who loves evil and
wickedness for its own sake. The Moor, in the single-heartedness of his passions, whether of love or of jealousy, is as easy
a victim for lago as Desdemona, who has all the simplicity of
innocence that suspects nothing.
" King Lear" says Professor Dowden, " is the greatest single
achievement in poetry of the Teutonic or northern genius."
Shakspere has nowhere more touching conceptions than the
characters of Cordelia and Lear and his faithful fool; no more
touching scene than that in which Lear, who has thirsted all his
life for a little affection, cannot believe that the one being who
would give it him is dead—
'' Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha !
What is't thou sayst ?—Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low."

At the close of his life Shakspere wrote the romances of Pericles,
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. They are the
expressions of Shakspere's serene and sympathetic old age.
" In the latest plays of Shakspere the sympathetic reader can
discern unmistakably a certain abandonment of the common joy
of the world, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and
sadnesses of life, and at the same time, all the more, this tender

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

229

bending over those who are, like children, still absorbed in their
individual joy and sorrow."
Romances are not always the work of a youthful imagination.
Less crude, more sympathetic, and more true is the fancy of
genius in its old age, stimulated by memories. Shakspere in his
last years could even conceive creatures of the imagination pure
and simple. Critics may strive in vain to find out whether by
Caliban Shakspere meant the people, or the understanding apart
from the imagination, or the primitive man abandoned to himself,
or the missing link, or one of the powers of nature over which
the scientific intellect (in The Tempest represented by Prospero)
obtains command, or the colony of Virginia. Caliban exists only
in the imaginary world as the impersonation of unintelligent
animal nature. Mr. Browning has done more than any critic to
make us realise the conception—
1i

Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is done,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine, small eft things course,
Run in and out each arm and make him laugh ;
And while above his head a pompion plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard ;
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch, and crunch,—
He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider's web."

That clumsy sort of idealisation that consists in allegory was never
Shakspere's. Morals may be drawn from him, but they are unconscious. Many of his lines which have become almost proverbs
fall from him quite casually, and sometimes even in a way that
appears as if he had not realised their full meaning. " The interpretations of the words of genius are often wider than the
thought which prompted them." Shakspere was probably not
aware that he was enunciating one of the greatest truths when he
makes Henry V. say—
' l There is a soul of goodness in things evil
Would men observingly distil it out; "

for he adds, with the narrowest application of it,—
' ' For our bad neighbour makes us early stirrers,
Which is both helpful and good husbandry."

230

SHAKSPERE.

[CHAP. IX.

It is Polonius, the incarnation of worldly wisdom, who says in
the middle of a speech, in which he is exhorting Laertes to dress
well, not to lend or borrow money—
" To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
" Lessons " may be drawn from the studies of character in the
historical plays and the tragedies ; but even Dr. Johnson, much
as he would have liked it, cannot convict Shakspere of being a
preacher : his aim, he laments, is more to amuse than to instruct
by being moral. There is indeed a deep moral hidden in every
one of ShakspereVtragedies ; but it is there unconsciously—it is
the moral that lies hidden away behind life itself. It is because
Shakspere's great nature reflected all the facts of the world so
truthfully and so fully that his works contain for us an inspiration, an everlasting beauty and interest. " If the facts of the
world be themselves sacred—parts of a divine order of things,
and interpenetrated by that supreme reality, apprehended yet
unknowable, of which the worlds of matter and of mind are a
manifestation—then Shakspere is the truest moralist we have
had, because he encourages us to observe closely the world and
its life." I t is his reverence and devotion to truth and reality,
his love for and his interest in everything that is human, cramped
and narrowed by no artificial standard of right and wrong, that
will make him live as a great artist and unconscious teacher till
the end of time. He shows us that life is very beautiful, very
interesting, very important, never futile, though we may understand neither its beginning nor its end. " Even though death end
all, these things at least are—beauty and force, purity, sin and
love, anguish and joy. These things are, and therefore life cannot be a little idle whirl of dust. We are shown the strong man
taken in the toils, the sinner sinking farther and farther away
from light and reality and the substantial life of things, into the
dubious and the dusk, the pure heart all vital and confident and
joyous. We are shown the glad vicarious sacrifice of soul for
soul, the malign activity of evil, the vindication of right by the
true justiciary; we are shown the good common things of the
world and the good things that are rare—the love of parents and
children, the comradeship of good men, the exquisite vivacity,
courage, and high-spirited intellect of noble girlhood, the devotion
of man and woman to man and woman—the vision of life rises

CHAP. IX.]

SHAKSPERE.

231

before us and we know that the vision represents a reality."
In the light of Shakspere's soul are paled all false ideals. Behind
that art which makes him the greatest of all dramatists lay a
nature that was not only inspired by the beautiful, but penetrated
with the grandeur of truth.

C H A P T E R X.
BEN JONSON.

Born 1573; educated at Westminster School; probably went to St.
> John's College, Cambridge ; for a short time connected with his stepfather's bricklaying business ; then joined the army and went to the
Low Countries; on his return settled in London not later than 1597 ;
became an actor ; married ; and in 1619 became Poet Laureate ; died
August 1635.
TRAGEDIES.

Sejanus, acted by 1603 ; Catiline, acted by 1611.
COMEDIES.

Every Man in His Humour, acted by 1597 or 1598 ; Every Man out of
His Humour, acted by 1599 ; The Case is Altered, acted by 1599 ;
Cynthia's Bevels, acted by 1600 ; The Poetaster, acted by 1601 ;
Volpone, acted by 1605 ; Epicoene, acted by 1609 ; The Alchemist,
acted by 1610 ; Bartholomew Fair, acted by 1614 ; The Devil is an
Ass, acted by 1616 ; The Staple of News, acted by 1625 ; The New
Inn, acted by 1629 ; The Magnetic Lady, acted by 1632 ; The Tale
of a Tub, acted by 1633.
FRAGMENTS : Found after his Death.
The Fall of Mortimer (a tragedy); The Sad Shepherd (a pastoral).

" H E is a great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and
scorner of others; given rather to lose a friend than a jest;
jealous of every word or action of those about him (especially
after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth);
a dissembler of ill-parts which reign in him, a bragger of some
good that he wanteth; thinketh nothing well but what either he
himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or
done; he is passionately kind and angry; careless either to gain
or keep; vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself. . . .
For any religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best
sayings and deeds often to the worst, oppressed with fantasie,

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

233

which hath ever mastered his reason, a general disease in many
poets. His inventions are smooth and easy: but above all he
excelleth in a translation." Such was Drummond's summary of
the personality and powers of Ben Jonson—written shortly after
the poet had paid him a visit of two or three weeks during his
stay in Scotland in 1618. But the grain of salt which one must
take with the judgment of one poet on another is a very large
one; full allowance must be made for the moods of genius : one
must allow in this case for the mood of the sensitive melancholy
Drummond, irritated perhaps by the egoistic and wine-excited
Jonson, who evidently with superabundant energy, freed from
the claims of work, had loudly vaunted himself and his talents,
at the expense of his contemporaries. " He was better versed and
he knew more in Greek and Latin," he said, " than all the poets
in England." Ben Jonson's personality was likely to be misunderstood by his contemporaries, and especially by those in the
same walk of life. He had all the faults of an eager creative
nature, irritability, excitability intensified by drink, and that
extreme belief in himself and his powers which was far more
than the self-confidence of genius,—far more than that self-confidence which Michael Angelo said was necessary to every artist, so
that, believing in himself, " he may produce something of worth
and value." Had we to trust alone to Jonson's contemporaries
for an estimate of his personality, we should form but an unpleasing idea of it. But to Jonson's discredit as a dramatist, be
it said, no artist has left a greater impress of self on his works :
to understand the individuality of this great Elizabethan, we
have only to turn to his plays, for it stands there towering above
all his creations, massive, egoistic, and self-conscious. He was
the most self-conscious, as Shakspere was the most unself-conscious of Elizabethan artists; he had none of the impersonal
philosophic interest in life which makes the ideal dramatist.
Too egoistic to feel outward influences strongly, he had none of
that power of assimilating and growing by experience so characteristic of Shakspere, so marked in his literary work; we are
always aware of his personality as we read his dramas; he is
always present behind his creations, conscious of a great ideal,
pointing out the follies and the vices of a world, with whose
inhabitants he seems to have no feeling of human fellowship.
Yet his life was full and varied, and he acquired in the course of
it a vast stock of knowledge, both practical and literary, which
he turned to account in his dramatic work. Placed first at a
school in Charing Cross, he was afterwards removed to West-

234

BEN" JONSON.

[CHAP. X.

minster School, where his intellectual welfare was carefully looked
after by the antiquary Camden, one of the masters there, and
from whom he acquired the habit, to which he always steadily
adhered, of writing all his compositions first in prose, then afterwards turning them into verse. It was probably Camden's
stimulus, added to his natural tastes and aptitude, that made him
dive deep then and in after life into all sorts of branches of
learning, searching for that knowledge—
"The nectar that keeps sweet,
A perfect soul even in this grave of sin."
Shortly after the completion of his education here, following
on a vain attempt to pursue his stepfather's trade and become a
bricklayer, he served in a campaign in the Low Countries, where
English troops were assisting Maurice of Nassau. Here it was
that he gained the "rudiments of military science," and that
respect for the profession which he shows in the epilogue to the
Poetaster, the conception of the character of Captain Tucca in
this play being in no way intended to detract from the honour
of that "great profession which I once did prove." After his
return, his marriage with " a shrew, yet honest," he began his
career in connection with Henslowe's company, probably first as
an actor, then as an author; Henslowe, as was his custom, furnishing the ready money, which was to support him till he completed the required plays. The facts of his life bear evidence
to noble traits in his character, to that seriousness of thought
and that interest in the deeper problems of life which gave him
his strong moral tone, which made him unlike other Elizabethan
artists, deeply interested in questions of religious faith, causing
him to be converted once from the Protestant to the Catholic
faith, then again, twelve years after, to the Protestant faith again;
making him a diligent student of theology, writing—
"Those humble gleanings of divinity,
After the fathers and those wiser guides,
Whom faction had not drawn to study sides,"

which were lost in the burning of his library. And his independence, of patrons, which he himself loudly vaunted, "never
esteeming a man for the name of a lord," was doubtless a fact.
He had indeed friends among the nobility, but it was probably
friendship not interest that made the attachment. Pembroke,
whose discrimination made him worthy to be the friend of any
genius, sent him always at the beginning of every new year .£20

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

235

with which to buy books; but Sir Walter Baleigh, to one of
whose sons Jonson was tutor in 1613, and who might thus have
been used by him as a stepping-stone to worldly greatness, was
lightly thought of by him. " Sir W. Kaleigh," he said, " esteems
more of fame than of conscience : the best wits of England were
employed for making his historie." The social standing of an
author evidently did not influence Jonson's criticism on his
works; he hesitated not, when in Paris, to tell Cardinal du
Perron that his translations of Virgil were naught. As for royal
favour, there is no evidence of his having received any under
Elizabeth, though she was present at a representation of Every
Man in His Humour, and though he was called upon by a fellowpoet to write a lament on her death; and the patronage he
received from James I. and Charles I., the name and honour of
Laureate, the reversion of the office of the Master of the Bolls,
the pension of 100 marks, first given by James I. and continued
by Charles I., in deference to a hint given by the poet, in the
New Inn, 1629, were all of the nature of rewards to the capable
and versatile poet, who supplied the court with entertaining and
varied masks. And that his devotion to the service of the court
was not the result of a servile spirit, but of a belief in its power
of being an influence for good, is abundantly shown in his
address to it, " t h e special fountain of manners," prefixed to
Cynthia's Bevels. " Thou art a beautiful and brave spring and
waterest all the noble plants of this island. In thee the whole
kingdom dresseth itself, and is ambitious to use thee as her
glass. Beware then thou render men's figures truly, and teach
them no less to hate their deformities than to love their forms :
for to grace these should come reverence, and no man call that
lovely which is not also venerable. It is not powdering, perfuming, and every day smelling of the tailor, converteth to a
beautiful object, but a mind shining through any suit which
needs no false light either of riches or honor to help it." And
to a court, which to him was the representative of all the
refinement and beauty and elevation in the United Kingdom, Ben Jonson was always the faithful "servant but not
slave."
Even to the darker facts of his life, his quarrels with his
literary associates, there is much that should justly be urged as
palliation. Ben Jonson was a most careful and conscientious
worker, with a high ideal of what the stage ought to be, and
although it cannot be said of him, as of Ovid in the Poetaster,
that his sharpness was most excusable—

236

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. x.

" As being forced out of a suffering virtue
Oppressed with the license of the times,"
yet that want of magnanimity, approaching to spite, which tinged
his reflections on his adversaries in Cynthia's Revels and the
Poetaster, was partly due to the grief which he felt at seeing the
stage lowered by the slovenly work of men, who looked upon it
merely as a lucrative profession, and who therefore would write
anything likely to take with the public. Conscious, too, of high
aims dutifully carried out in his dramatic work, he was angry
with the public who, coming to the theatre to be entertained,
did not appreciate the careful, purposeful, and moral works of
art which he sometimes put before them.
" 'Twere simple fury still thyself to waste
On such as have no taste,"
he writes in the Ode to Himself, turning the tables on his contemptuous audience—
" Minds that are great and free
Should not on fortune pause,
'Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause."
If the " dainty age cannot endure reproof . . . yet do not demean
self by serving the stage," but
" Sing high and aloof,
Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull asses' throat."
Yet it must be said that Jonson's tone shows that he thought
not so much of " the crown of virtue " as of the " squeamish
censure of the king's subjects." He could administer to himself much moral consolation derived from the reflection that
" The vast rude swinge of general confluence
Is, in particular- ends, exempt from sense ;"
that
" Custom in course of honour even errs,
And they are best whom fortune least prefers ;"
but he was not one of those who could be calmly resigned in the
sense of the superiority of unappreciatedness. The irritable tone
in which he administers this consolation to himself is akin to
that of a modern poet, who invents the most telling literary
abuse to fling at those whose pin-pricks of criticism he affects
hardly to have felt. Jonson, having carefully elaborated and

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

237

polished his pearl, could never forgive the swine for being indiscriminating beasts : it was his nature to think more of the value
of what he threw before them than of its suitability to their
needs) and never, too, could he forgive those who strove to adapt
their work to these needs. For artists who had real artistic
promptings, who instinctively wrote on a high level, he had
sincere admiration and friendship. Beaumont he calls his son—
was pleased to have his criticism; with Fletcher he was friendly;
and at the Mermaid Tavern and afterwards at the "Devil," he
used to mix freely with other dramatists and poets, and celebrate those lyric feasts of which Herrick wrote—
" "When wine did make them
Not mad, but nobly wild."
He was kind to the rising young authors, who gathered round
him as a " Metropolitan in poetry," and we may conclude that
it was possible even for a repentant renegade in art to enter into
his favour, for in 1604, not long after the publication of Satiromastix, we find Dekker dedicating the Malcontent; to him.
But, above all, we are indebted to him for the most profoundly
intelligent and admiring criticism that any fellow-poet has passed
on Shakspere. The " Johannes -factotum, the Shakescene of a
county," the bird dressed in borrowed feathers, is celebrated justly
by Ben Jonson as^ the " soul of the age," the embodiment of all
that was greatest in the thought and feeling of the great Elizabethan period. To another great poetic mind Shakspere recommended himself by the sweetness of " his native wood notes
wild :" to Ben Jonson it is his art which calls for deepest
admiration, or rather that interpenetration in his work of nature
and of art, for—
" Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean ; so that over art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes."
And this art was especially Shakspere's, shared by him with all
great creating natures. " N o t to thy nature alone must my
praise be given," writes Ben Jonson—
"Thy art,
My gentle Shakspere, must enjoy a part,
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion . . .
For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou ! Look how the father's face

238

BEN JONSOK

[CHAP. x.

Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspere's mind and manners brightly shine
In his well-turned and newfiledlines."
The key to much of Ben Jonson's work, as well as the explanation
of many of the incidents of his literary career which appear not
greatly to his credit, lies in the fact that he looked upon the
stage as a great and responsible profession, capable of attaining
a high ideal. It was his endeavour to make dramatic art bring
out the deeper meaning of life, to make it reflect the profoundness and the reality of things and not only the play of fleeting
emotions and passions. To be a great teacher, to make the stage
a mighty influence for good, not merely to serve as the play of
life—this was the struggle of Ben Jonson's career. It was of
this great ideal that he was always conscious, too conscious for
his powers as an artist; it is this that sometimes makes his
plays heavy and dull with purpose—that makes him neglect his
plot in order to bring out certain points of character—that makes
him stand by and explain his characters, instead of making them
live and act for themselves : and it was because he was conscious
of a great mission as a dramatic artist that he was fierce against
those who refused to help it either as author or spectator. Only
too truly was it said of him by Sir John Suckling—
'' He too deserv'd the bays,
For his were called works, while other's were but plays :"
only too truthfully was his epitaph inscribed
" 0 rare Ben Jonson,"
for he was rare in that age of passionate, spontaneous, uncontrolled
men—a man who had a moral genius above his age, who had
moral vision enough to be its teacher, but who failed in that
artistic strength which should have fused into one whole his
powers of conception and creation.
Even in the lowest branch of dramatic art, in masks and
pageants, which, it might have been assumed, were legitimately
intended to entertain, Ben Jonson endeavoured to introduce a
deeper meaning. He came into collision with Inigo Jones because he tried to reduce the scenic and decorative element in
masks,—to give more interest in character and a deeper significance to the action. If he had been thoroughly successful
in his efforts he would have destroyed the essential difference
between the mask and the drama. The distinctive elements in

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

239

the mask are " the spectacle, the general mise-en-scene, the ideas
suggested by dancing, scenery, and lyric song, with a varying
proportion of declamation and dialogue." The distinctive elements in the drama are the element of action and of character.
In the idea of the mask there was no fixed law as to the proportion of declamation and dialogue to the decorative element; in
its most elaborate scenic form it resembled the pageant; but
in the hands of Ben Jonson the predominance of the elements
of character and significant action approximated it to the drama
proper, much to the disgust of Inigo Jones. In writing masks
Jonson found not only lucrative employment,—the mask being an
entertainment much sought after at Court, as gratifying its
exclusive and aristocratic tastes,—but employment which was
congenial to his soul, in which he could deal with the symbolism
and deeper significance of facts. " Allusiveness," as Mr. Ward
says, " was the; soul of the mask, for these entertainments were
generally called for on the occasion of some great public or royal
domestic event, and the talent and ingenuity of the artist was
much exercised in giving double and appropriate meanings to
action and character." Jonson, by the nature of his mind, was
admirably qualified to succeed in these allegorical renderings,
and his masks are distinguished by a greater symbolism and a
deeper meaning than had before been customary. Personifications
of virtues, which in the hands of ordinary mask writers would
have been meaningless and conventional, assume in his hands a
moral intention. What can be more hackneyed, as a rule, than
the personification of Truth, yet this figure in Jonson's Hymenal,
or the Solemnities of Masque and Barriers, performed at the
marriage of the Earl of Essex, is striking and significant.
*' Upon her head she wears a crown of stars,
Through which her orient hair waves to her waist,
By which believing mortals hold her fast,
And in these golden cords are carried even,
Till with her breath she blows them up to heaven.
She wears a robe enchased with eagles' eyes,
To signify her sight in mysteries :
Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove,
And at her feet do witty serpents move :
Her spacious arms do reach from east to west,
And you may see her heart shine through her breast.
Her right hand holds a sun with burning rays,
Her left a curious bunch of golden keys,
With which heaven's gates she locketh and displays.
A crystal mirror hangeth at her breast,
By which men's consciences are searched and drest;

240

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. x.

On her coach wheels Hypocrisy lies racked ;
And squint-eyed Slander with Yainglory backed
Her bright eyes burn to dust, in which shines Fate :
An angel ushers her triumphant gait,
Whilst with herfingersfans of stars she twists,
And with them beats back Error, clad in mists.
Eternal unity behind her shines,
That fire and water, earth and air combines.
Her voice is like a trumpet, loud and shrill,
Which bids all sounds in earth and heaven be still."
Here, as elsewhere, Jonson shows himself as belonging to that
Teutonic race that developed Puritanism, never at ease in the
mere contemplation of beauty, only happy when piercing into
the depths and finding moral significance.
To such a mind, serious in its views, conscious of high aims
and of the significance of life, tragedy might seem a suitable
field. But to tragedy Ben Jonson did not take naturally: he
was driven to it by the storm which he had raised around him
by the publication of CynthiaJs Revels and the Poetaster. " Since
the comic muse," he says,
" Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try
If tragedy have a more kind aspect."
It was not to express his own soul that he wrote tragedy.
" If I prove the pleasure of but one,
So he judicious be, he shall be alone
A theatre unto me."
Always, Ben Jonson wrote for, and was conscious of an
audience: always, while writing, must he have been conscious
of the impression that his work would make on others.
For the subject of his first tragedy (and this is characteristic,
for Jonson in order to bring out his ideas had always recourse
to contrasts) he chose the degenerate days of Home,—when
Eomans were no longer animated by the soul of godlike Cato,
" h e that durst be good, when Caesar durst be evil;" nor by the
spirit of " constant Brutus," proof against all charm of benefit.
He chooses the time when they are dead, when " they have fled
the light "—
" Those mighty spirits
Lie raked up with their ashes in their urns,
And not a spark of their eternal fire
Glows in a present bosom."
Thus laments Silvius, the senator, who alone in his integrity

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSOJST.

241

is worthy to represent the old spirit of Eome, and who, as
such, is the deadly enemy of Sejanus. For Sejanus rises to
power on the decay of this spirit and the ruins of the free
institutions of Eome. At the close of his life he can say—
'' All Rome hath been my slave,
The senate sat an idle looker-on
And witness of my power, when 1 have blush'd
More to command, than it to suffer : all
The Fathers have sat ready and prepared
To give me empire, temples, or their throats
When I would ask them, and (what crowns the top),
Rome, senate, people, all the world have seen
Jove but my equal, Csesar but my second."
Sejanus has risen to this position through crime upon crime:
the climax of the action of the piece is when Eome is his
slave, and Csesar his creature. " T h y thoughts are ours in
all," says Tiberius, marking as it were the culmination of the
action. The fall begins when Sejanus rouses the suspicion
of Tiberius by asking for the hand of his daughter-in-law Livia;
while in the retirement of the country, where Sejanus supposes
him to be occupied in pleasures which distract him from public
business, his instrument Sertorius Macro, openly the friend of
Sejanus, secretly communicates to the emperor the result of his
observations on Sej anus's ambitious designs. Tiberius, without
breaking with Sejanus, prepares his ruin, which happens dramatically in the Senate, to which Sejanus has been lured under
pretext of being invested with new honours. He is first
separated from his guards, then crushed by a letter from the
emperor read before the Senate, disclosing all Sejanus's plans:
accused and condemned, he is denied judicial punishment, and
torn to pieces by the mob, who the day before hung upon his
look—"no less than human life on human destiny." The plot
is neatly constructed and well worked out. In the course of the
action Jonson finds occasion for the enunciation of much unquestioned sentiment and moral truism, for the display of much
knowledge, inclining one to say of the author, in the words of a
character in the Staple of News, " h e is an errant learned man
that wrote it," and also for the dignified expression of a Eoman,
and at the same time Jonsonian, fortitude which he puts into
the mouth of Silvius—
'' 0 you equal gods
Whose justice not a world of wolf-turn'd men
Shall make me to accuse, howe'er provoked
Have I, for this, so oft engaged myself,
E

242

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. X.

Stood in the heat and fervour of a fight,
When Phoebus sooner hath forsook the day
Than I the field against the blue-eyed Gauls
And crisped Germans . . .
It is not life, whereof I stand enamoured,
Nor shall my end make me accuse my fall;
The coward and the valiant man must fall,
Only the cause and manner how discerns them."

There is a hint of Jonson's half fierce, half comic, social satire
in the scenes between Livia and her physician Eudemus; but of
characterisation, in the full and proper sense of the word, there
is little. The personality of the characters is distinct, and
especially is our attention fixed on that of Sejanus and Tiberius :
but neither are complex creations, in neither is there that
inward struggle of motive and of will which is the essence of
the highest dramatic characterisation. Sejanus is ambition—
cunning, ingenious ambition—personified, falling before the
forces of Destiny. Tiberius is the weak slave of the strong,
who has yet cunning enough to scheme the fall of his tyrant,
without breaking with him or awakening his dangerous
suspicions.
To feel what this drama wants, compare it with one of
Shakspere's Eoman plays—Julius Ccesar, for instance. It may
not be inferior to it in plot, in interest of incident, in construction; it is not below it at times in dignity and force of
language; but is there any character in it which calls forth in us
the same interest as that which we must unhesitatingly give to
the character of Brutus ? is there any sign in the conceptions of
the character of Sejanus and Tiberius that Ben Jonson realised
that the true interest of the dramatic characterisation lies in
the artistic rendering of the psychological struggle of motive and
of will. Sejanus's soliloquies are secret plottings to procure the
satisfaction of single-minded ambition; Tiberius, the secret
plottings of a weak cunning nature to ruin Sejanus without
premature discovery by him. Unity of character is preserved
throughout; but of characterisation, in the deeper sense of the
word, there is none.
Of this tragedy Ben Jonson himself had the highest opinion.
In his dedicatory letter to Lord Aubigny, he says, " I f ever
any ruin were so great as to survive, I think this be one I send
you, the fall of Sejanus;" and to the reader he says, "If in
truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

243

elevation, fulness and frequency of sentence, I have discharged
the office of a tragic writer, let not the absence of these forms
(the three unities of the classic drama) be imputed to me." But
not truth of argument, dignity of persons, etc., united even to
the three classic unities, can make the ideal tragedy. Ben
Jonson failed here as he failed in all his dramatic work: his
characterisation is too crude and too coarse; he fails in observing and understanding the complexity of human nature; he
has made only a superficial study of the inward mental life,
which is the spring of action.
Perhaps in " fulness and frequency of sentence " his tragedy
of Catiline is superior to that of Sejantis, but the personages in
it, with the exception of Cicero, show that exaggerated distinctness of personality which arises from too exclusively dwelling
on one peculiarity,—a tendency to which Jonson, from the very
nature of his theory of characterisation, was specially liable. It
is from Catiline that Charles Lamb has quoted the fine scene
of the meeting of the three principal conspirators, opening with
the well-known imagery of dawn, which Ben Jonson's genius
has here rescued from the commonplace—
" It is, methinks, a morning full of fate :
It risetli slowly as her sullen car
Had all the weights,of sleep and death hung at it.
She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black.
Her face is like a water turn'd to blood,
And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night ere noon of day."

It was in the field of comedy that Jonson's genius found its
happiest development: it was in comedy that he could best give
expression to his idea of characterisation, his theory of humours ;
it was in comedy that he could best be the teacher of his age,
that he could best lash the follies of his time. Jonson's theory
of humours embraces not only his idea of characterisation, but
also his deepest philosophy of life. Humour to Jonson means
neither outward peculiarity, neither the whim nor caprice, it is
taken to mean by Shakspere, neither that humour in the modern
sense, which is as superior to wit, says Sir William Temple, as
easiness to knowledge. By this term Jonson means those elements in the human constitution which influence the physical
and mental being: the humours of the body are choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood; those which influence the mental
being are certain qualities of the mind, one of which predominating and so possessing a man, " draws all his affects, spirits, and

244

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. x.

powers, to turn one away." Thus his action is determined, and
knowing the humour you can prophesy of the action. In the
same sense Bacon uses the word when he says " i t is a different
thing to understand men's humours and yet to fail in business
transactions," though probably Jonson would differ from Bacon as
to the all-importance of studying the humours of mankind, for
to Jonson the study of humours was the one key to the knowledge of man : it made the interest of character, it gave the, clue
to action. I t was the one thing which to him made characterisation possible. In tragedy a predominant impulse determining
action had given unity to his characters: in comedy a ruling
peculiarity, generally of a ridiculous kind, made him realise his
personage. No better analysis of the workings of a gradually
predominating quality can be found than in the speech of Kitely
in Every Man in his Humour, when he finds his mind gradually
becoming a prey to jealousy—
" First it begins
Solely to work upon the phantasy,
Filling her seat with such pestiferous air
As soon corrupts the judgment: and from thence
Sends like contagion to the memory :
Still each to other giving the infection,
"Which as a subtle vapour spreads itself
Confusedly through every sensive part
Till not a thought or motion in the mind
Be free from the black poison of suspect."

Needless to say, Ben Jonson's comic characters are always
caricatures—Captain Bobadil, Master Stephen, Master Mathew,
are exceedingly amusing: but they are amusing because they
are abnormal: they are human nature perverted. Captain
Bobadil would undertake, " for the benefit of the State, not only
to spare the entire lives of the Queen's subjects in general, but
to save the half, nay, the three parts of her yearly charge of
holding war," by a plan of choosing twenty gentlemen of good
spirit, strong and able constitution, taught the special rules of
fence till they were almost as good as himself, who should slowly
but surely, in two hundred days, challenge and kill by twenties
the enemy's army of 40,000 strong. He is an example of the
military humour, but he is an abnormal soldier: as unique in
his exaggerated propensities as is Mr. Pecksniff among architects
and fathers, and Mr. Stiggins among Methodist preachers. So
too Master Mathew, of a literary humour, who reads aloud to
Captain Bobadil, whom he has not yet found tedious from his

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSOK

245

dearth of judgment, " a little thing of his own," wherein he
celebrates " t h e happy state of turtle-billing lovers." He sympathises with Stephen (who describes himself as "somewhat
melancholy, yet you shall command me, sir, in anything incident
to a gentleman")—"I am melancholy myself, divers times, sir,"
he says to Stephen, " and then I do no more but take pen and
paper, and presently overflow you half a score or a dozen sonnets
at a sitting." Equally amusing is Captain Tucca (of the Poetaster),
for whom poetry has as great a repulsion as it has attractions
for Mathew and Stephen. Ovid the younger vexes his father
by his devotion to letters. Captain Tucca endeavours to heal
the family breach, and to bring Ovid the younger to reason.
"Come hither, Callimachus, thy father tells me thou art too
poetical, boy; thou must not be so : thou must leave them,
young novice, thou must: they are a sort of poor starved rascals,
that are ever wrapped up in foul linen, and can boast of nothing
but a lean visage, peering out of a seam-rent suit, the very emblems of beggary." Without doubt there is a great deal of truth
in these sketches, viewed as conceptions of character, and certainly
the theory which underlay their production did a vast deal in
the way of reforming the comic stage, in relieving it from the
practical jokes, the low buffooning incidents, which before had
been considered as constituting comedy: it certainly did make
predominant on the comic stage the interest of characterisation :
but the characterisation was of a crude sort, too much of the
nature of caricature. If Jonson had dealt with Shylock he would
have reflected none of the complexities of the Jew's character:
he would simply have dwelt on his avarice as overshadowing
every other quality. I t would have been for ever " O my ducats,
O my daughter." The complete theory of humours Jonson has
not given us. " Ah, what misery," says Kitely, " in such extremes,
to want the mind's erection."
" Let the mind go still with the bodie's stature ;
Judgment is fit for judges, give me nature,"

says Amelia, in The Case is Altered. The details of the practical
lesson Ben Jonson wished to convey by holding extremes up to
ridicule,—rthe means he would take to cultivate judgment, selfcontrol, " t o give the mind's erection,"—are points concerning
which, contrary to his usual custom, he gives us no advice. He
certainly cannot have suggested, as a practical solution of the
problem, the moral of Every Man out of his Humour, where he
shows that every humour can be cured by its own excess. That

246

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. X.

Jonson was conscious of working a reform in comedy is evident
from the prologue to Every Man in his Humour, which is
thoroughly and intensely characteristic of him from the first line
to the last, touching on his superiority to most poets, the .excellence of his comedy as compared to that popularly appreciated,
the moral good it intends to do by sporting with human follies
instead of human crimes.
"Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not bettered much,
Yet ours for want hath not so served the stage
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age,
Or purchase your delight at such a rate
As, for it he himself must justly hate
He rather prays you will be pleased to see
One such to-day, as other plays should be."
The personages his comedy chooses are such as true comedy, by
which we may suppose him to mean classic comedy, would choose,
in order to hold an image up to the times. But so anxious is he
to make his art a lesson, so anxious to personify vice in character and hold it up to ridicule, that he loses sight of the modifying attributes which human nature, however perverted, seldom
loses, and in his endeavour to be improving he falsifies his art.
Human nature is essentially complex, and the mind that cannot
mirror it in all its complexity can never be that of a great
dramatic artist.
The Case is Altered deserves attention among Ben Jonson's
earlier comedies, because the great moralist, not being absorbed
in the creation of characters destined to convey moral lessons to
the audience, had time to pay attention to his plot, which in the
first two comedies had decidedly suffered from his absorption in
the characterisation. After the fifth scene the plot of Every Man
in his Humour becomes more and more involved, and evidently,
according to the author's view, of less and less importance. Every
Man out of his Humour, Schlegel calls " a rhapsody of ridiculous
scenes, without connexion or progress." The Case is Altered is a
comedy of intrigue, in which the action is the chief interest. Its
story is based on two Latin plays, of which the plots are interwoven with considerable ingenuity. But plot alone could not
occupy Jonson: in this play he gave a hint of that tendency
towards personal satire which afterwards, more fully developed,
troubled so greatly the literary atmosphere. Antonio Balladino,
the pageant poet, was thought to be identifiable with Anthony

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

247

Miinday; and the satiric treatment of this character was the
first step on the road towards that general and personal satire
of his fellow dramatists, which was his absorbing purpose in
Cynthia!s Revels and the Poetaster,
Angry with those who did not take the same high and moral
view of art as himself, conscious of a just " severity in the fashion
and collection of himself," and wrath with the carelessness and
conventionality of many of his fellow playwrights, he embodied
in Cynthia's Bevels a satire of the fiercest kind against the folly
of those who " conform to conventional demands, contrasting their
ends and aims with those of the true poet and artist who wishes
to please the highest authorities in taste, and is true to his own
high standard." It contained, strictly speaking, no personal
satire, unless the allusion to promoters of other men's jests be
meant to refer directly to Lyly, Marston, and perhaps Dekker;
it was a defiance to actors in general, likely to touch those who
were not conscious of stupendous aims, and looked upon the stage
as a profession; it was general satire in the sense that the cap
was not actually put by Jonson on the heads of those who plainly
in his mind and in their own belonged to this class; but it was
personal in that the cap was certainly thrown suggestively at
their feet.
Dekker and Marston are not actually personified in Ben
Jonson's creations, neither is Crites, " that creature of a most
perfect and divine temper, so truly learned that he affects not to
show it," actually identifiable with Ben Jonson. Jonson was too
much of a dramatist to identify himself entirely with one of his
creations, yet at the same time he was too egoistic to separate
the personality of himself and his enemies from his conceptions
of character. Crites represented probably Ben Jonson's ideal,
and we know how far he, " clear and confident as Jove," believed
himself to have attained it.
Interest in character and absorption in satire made him
neglect the construction of his play; " a s the play drags its
slow length along it becomes little more than a picture of manners." Mixed with a Puritan sententiousness, which at times
recalls the great poet of Puritanism, Spenser—
'' 0 how despised and base a thing is man
If he not strive to check his grovelling thoughts,"
are passages of true humour. Specially real and unforced is
that dealing with the then rather hackneyed idea, a constant
moral reflection of the time, that the face is not the index of the

248

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. X.

mind, as Dion in Philaster says, " Men's hearts and faces being
so far asunder that they hold no intelligence." Amorphous, a
courtier, whose attractions are so irresistible that he has had to
catalogue the names of three hundred and forty-five ladies, " all
nobly, if not princely, descended," who fell victims to his charms,
endeavours to prove this point to Asotus, a courtier aspirant.
He acts faces to him : each, he says, "appearing as his most
proper and genuine aspect."
" First," he says, " for your merchant or city face, 'tis this,—
a dull plodding face, still looking in a direct line forward. There
is no great matter in this face. Then have you your student's
or academic face, which is here an honest, simple, and methodical
face, but somewhat more spread than the former. The third is
your soldier's face,—a menacing and astounding face, that looks
broad and big : the grace of this face consisteth much in a beard.
The anti-face to this is your lawyer's face,—a contracted, subtle,
and intricate face, full of quirks and turnings, a labyrinthean
face, now angularly, now circularly, every way aspected. . . .
But now to come to your face of faces, or courtier's face,—'tis of
three sorts, according to our subdivision of a courtier, elementary,
practic, and theoretic. Your courtier theoretic is he that hath
arrived to his furthest, and doth know the court rather by speculation than by practice; and this is his face: a fastidious and
oblique face that looks as if it went with a vice and were screw'd
thus. Your courtier practic is he that is yet in his path, his
course, his way, and hath not touched the punctilio or point of
his hopes; his face is here : a most promising, open, smooth, and
overflowing face, that seems as it would run and pour itself into
you. . . . The courtier elementary, he that is in the alphabet of
his courtship : a light, revelling, and protesting face, now smiling,
which you may help much with a wanton wagging of your
head."
But the main interest of the piece for Jonson's contemporaries consisted in the storm that it raised in the literary atmosphere.
Dramatists, especially those with whom Jonson had worked,
did not stop to consider the moral justice of the rebukes administered by Crites; they concentrated their attention on the vindictive intention they saw in the poet's mind. He, hearing that
they intended to take revenge through the pen of Dekker, wrote
in haste the Poetaster,—abundant evidence that the previous satire
was general only in name, and sad evidence, too, of that petty
spite which was continually dragging Jonson down to earth,

CHAP. X.J

BEN JONSON.

249

degrading him for the time below the level of those whom he
wished to chastise. It is much kinder to Jonson's memory
to avoid the comparison of this play with the Frogs of Aristophanes ; it serves simply to bring out the fact that while Aristophanes interests himself in contrasting and comparing two poetic
types of the highest order, Jonson interests himself solely in
comparing his own aims and views with those of adversaries,
whose purpose and action he does all he can to blast. Dekker
under the name of Demetrius, Marston as Crispinus, are arraigned
for having " most ignorantly, foolishly, and, more like themselves,
maliciously gone about to deprave and calumniate the person and
writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, poet and priest to the
muses, and to that end mutually conspired and plotted, taxing
him falsely of self-love, arrogance, and impudence, railing, filching
translation, etc." Ultimately, and this is slightly to the credit
of Jonson, the highest poetic honours are given to Yirgil, by
whom it is almost certain Chapman is meant, although some
commentators have endeavoured to see in him the representative
of Shakspere, on the strength of lines which are indeed applicable to him—
" That Avhich he hath writ
Is with such judgment labor'd and distill'd
Through all the needful uses of our lives,
That could a man remember but his lines
He should not touch at any serious point,
But he might breathe his spirit out of him."

Quintus Horatius Flaccus is the loved Horace of Caesar, proud
of a soul "free as Caesar's/7 conscious of a virtuous justice that
will give to all what he knows is due, that considers jealousy and
ignorance the cause of detraction of virtuous merit.
Undoubtedly, Ben Jonson, posing as virtuous merit, cherished
by the imperial discriminating patron, would have been sufficiently
annoying, apart from the direct attacks contained in the Poetaster,
to have alone sharpened the darts flung at him in the Satiromastix. And it speaks well for Jonson that, after his affectation
of learning, his perversity in setting himself against the public
voice, his old clothes, his peculiar personal appearance, his
general arrogance contrasted with the modest merit of Demetrius
and .^Crispinus, have been touched upon, the greatest stress is
laid upon the slowness and carefulness and elaborateness of
his literary workmanship,—surely no fault in him, either as
artist or man. On his first appearance in the play he is repre-

250

BEN JONSOK.

[CHAP. x.

sented as sitting in his study, surrounded with numerous hooks,
endeavouring in vain to overcome a difficult line. " I , thy
inspired priest," he murmurs again and again, " i n flowing
numbers filled with sprite and flame—sprite and flame,"—and
advances no further in his address to his muse. Nevertheless,
so hurt was he by the storm he had raised, so far exceeding
in force and fury his expectations,—"As for the players," he
says, "'tis true I taxed them; and yet but some, and those so
sparingly," that he betook himself to tragedy.
It was when he returned from tragedy that he did his best
work, that he produced his comedies, in three of which—Volpone,
The Fox ; The Alchemist; and Epicoene-, The Silent Woman—he
shows himself at the height of his powers : in Volpone, having
entirely overcome his tendency to neglect the element of action;
in Epicoene, showing such power in the good construction of plot
as to call forth the praise of Dryden ; in all avoiding the clumsy
introduction of byplots, which, although pretty in themselves
—like that of the loves of Ovid and Julia in the Poetaster—
are like neglected threads in a piece of work, and spoil it as
finished art. The characters live and act for themselves, not
explaining themselves or being explained by the conscious analysis
of the author, as in Every Man in his Humour ; the moral is
more subtly wrapped up, there are fewer sententious utterances ; in fact, these productions of Jonson's strike one less as
works than as plays—there is more spontaneity, less evidence of
labour and of purpose in their composition. But The Alchemist
and Volpone were written with direct moral intention—The
Alchemist was to do its best to explode that belief which had for
so long absorbed scientific energy, a belief for which Jonson had
no tolerance, not seeing, like Bacon, that it fulfilled a purpose in
cultivating the field of science, and, like the spades of the sons
in iEsop's fable, did a useful work, though it failed in unearthing
the imaginary buried treasure. But a nature like that of Jonson's^
which saw only a little way, but saw that very clearly, could
have no forbearance for the Alchemist, who boasts that he
" Can extract the souls of all things by his art,
teach dull nature
What her own forces are."
In the person of Sir Epicure Mammon, who believes " he (the
Alchemist) is a divine instructor," Jonson jeers at the popular
credulity with his fiercest satire.

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

251

In Volpone, a play which, as Coleridge says, is an instance
of the difficulty of keeping up interest in a story where none of
the characters have goodness of heart, Jonson thunders a moral
against seekers after wealth, poetic justice being brought about
by the mutual ruin inflicted by the wicked and cunning on those
who are more wicked and more cunning. Yoltore and Corbuccio
are simply wicked, Volpone is wicked and cunning, but Moscha
is so wicked and so cunning as to be simply inhuman. Celia,
the one pure spirit in the play, in her cry,
" Are heaven and saints then nothing ?
Will they be blind and stupid ?"
is silenced by the husband, who holds honour as a breath, a mere
term, invented to awe fools. Ultimately Moscha turns round
upon his master, whom he had at first aided and abetted in his
devices to wring presents from his greedy friends; but in disclosing the guilt of others his own cannot be hidden, and general
ruin is the result.
In Fpicoene justice is administered in the course of the action
on Morose, the embodiment of that humour " who is afflicted by
all discourses but his own," all others appearing to him harsh and
irksome. He marries what he thinks to be a silent woman,
ultimately discovered to be a talkative boy.
Bartholomew Fair, another play which marks the prime of
Jonson, had its moral too. It contains a picture of London life,
similar in its details to that Vanity Fair from which a sterner
Puritan counselled the Christian to fly; but so little acknowledged
sympathy had Jonson with these ascetic moralists, the enemies
of the playhouse, that he filled this comedy with bitter satire
against them. But specially scornful is he of those who will
endeavour to fit the satire of this play on to actual persons.
" Let no one," he says, " b e so solemnly ridiculous as to search
out who was meant by the gingerbread woman, who by the
hobby-horse man, who by the costard-monger; nay, who by their
wares. Or that will pretend to affirm, on his own inspired
ignorance, what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the justice,
what great lady by the pig-woman, what concealed statesman by
the seller of mouse-traps, and so of the rest."
But only with reference to the historic view of Jonson's
dramatic attainments is it necessary to notice the good construction
of his plots : other interest they can have none for us. They are
inexpressibly coarse—they deal with the manners and customs of

252

BEET JONSOIsr.

[CHAP. x.

a society which apparently had the lowest possible standards of
morality. They point no morals for us. But what will always
interest us—what gives Jonson the same claim to fame as Dickens
will always have—are his caricatures of well-known, universal
types; of Sir John Daw, the literary and supercilious, eager to
give his opinion on literature in general:—" Aristotle, a mere
commonplace fellow ; Plato, a discourser ; Thucydides and Livy,
tedious and d r y ; Tacitus, an untied knot, sometimes worth the
untying—very seldom." . . . The poets . . . not worthy to be"
named as authors. Homer, an old, tedious, prolix ass, talks of
curries and chines of beef; Yirgil, of manuring land and bees ;
Horace, of I know not what." . . . Lady Would-be, the femme
savante, who quarrels with her husband " i n poetic fury and
historic storms," who has a little studied physic, but now
" I'm all for music, save in the forenoon
An hour or two for painting. I would have
A lady indeed to have all, letters and arts,
Be able to discourse, to write, to paint,
But principal as Plato holds your music ; "

who is at the same time all that a lady ought to be, with a high
standard of the proper : she would not seem
" Forward or violent, as the courtier says
It comes too near rusticity in a lady,
Which I would shun by all means."

Jonson, in his Discoveries, says : " The only decay or hurt of the
best man's reputation with the people is, their wits have outlived
the people's palates ; " but his last plays illustrate the truth that
decay of reputation comes from within, not only from without;
when desire to write outlives the spirit that inspires. Jonson's
decline is certainly that of a great artist, but not of the greatest.
His work is not, like Shakspere's,—heavy, and sometimes unartistic
with the weight of thought,—gathered from the experience of a
full life ; his style has not the involution given by over-condensation of matter, but it is stiff and empty : though still careful and
elaborate, full of aim and purpose, his style has lost spontaneity
and become mannerism. He falls into his old faults. In the
Magnetic Lady the humours of the persons are described rather
than illustrated by the action. In The New Inn, the plot is
ridiculous and unmanageable; and in The Tale of a Tub, a
picture of rural life, though there is much evidence of care and

CHAP. X.]

BEtf JONSON.

253

attention, there is little of that freshness and vivacity which are
required to make a picture of rural manners pleasing.
It
seems almost as if the Sad Shepherd, a fragment of which
was found after his death, must have been written at an earlier stage in his career, so remarkable is it for its freshness
and simplicity, striking even as proceeding from the pen of
Ben Jonson at his prime, free from all mannerism, all pomp of
style, bearing no suggestion in itself of that reform which
here, even in the sphere of the pastoral, he wished to work.
The pastoral was perhaps the most hopelessly conventional
form of art. Originally Art's refuge from the forms and conventionalities of actual life, it had become the most hackneyed of all artistic spheres. It had never had real simplicity ;
it had never breathed the real spirit of nature—the spirit of
"Wordsworth's poetry—except in its earliest form in the hands
of the Sicilians. The idea of a world of shepherds and shepherdesses, with primitive natural beliefs and customs, came
to be a vehicle for social satire, not only for that implied by
the contrast of this so-called ideal simplicity with the corruptions of society, but for actual, direct satire on the customs and
institutions of society. The Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser
contains eclogues of vehement raillery against the friars; and
ultimately the pastoral degenerated into that ornamental elaborate
form of art of which Fletcher's pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess
is an example, when the pastoral drama became simply the
machinery by which to introduce graceful songs, lyrics, and
dances ; or it became simply a burlesque, especially in the hands
of northern nations, who had that capacity for humour which
would hold no form of art sacred. But the artificiality of the
pastoral, even in its most nourishing periods in Spain under
Philips I. and II., in England in the Augustan age, in France
during the Watteau period, was never a secret to the artists
who employed it. I t was this artificiality that the robust genius
of Jonson wished to minimise; his success, as far as his own
attempt in this form of art was concerned, was complete. Instead of the conventional shepherds and shepherdesses, whose
loves and hates made the action of the drama, he introduced the
inspiriting and vigorous national legend of Bobin Hood, well
known through those ballads written when Bobin Hood drew
all popular feeling to him as the embodiment of the people's
resistance against the forest encroachments of the Norman
kings. Bobin Hood and his Merry Men and Maid Marian are
sufficiently real and simple characters to give vitality to a pas-

254

BEN JONSON.

[CHAP. x.

toral, and sufficiently rural in their natures and their ways to
give that rustic air which should be the distinctive feature of the
pastoral drama. The place of the stereotyped gods and goddesses
is taken by witches, also familiar and natural conceptions to the
English mind ; but Jonson's witches are neither the half objective,
half subjective creations of Shakspere, who suggest evil thoughts
and deeds to men, nor the creatures of Middleton's imagination,
who give to men help in procuring the means for executing the
evil designs which they themselves unaided have conceived:
they are things of independent malice and power, who delight in
tormenting human beings—things to be tracked out and hunted,
enemies to man's peace and his comfort. Alkin, an old shepherd,
instructs Eobin Hood's men how to find a witch and how she is
to be hunted—
" Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell,
Down in a pit o'ergrown with brakes and briars,
Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey,
Torn with an earthquake down unto the ground,
'Mongst graves, and grots, near an old charnel-house."

He knows " all her wiles and turns "—
*' The venom'd plants
"Wherewith she kills : where the sad mandrake grows,
Whose groans are deathful; the dead numbing night-shade ;
The stupefying hemlock ; adder's tongue,
And martegan ; the shrieks of luckless owls
We hear, and croaking night-crows in the air ;
Green-bellied snakes ; blue fire drakes in the sky ;
And giddy flitter mice with leather wings ;
And scaly beetles with their habergeons,
That make a humming murmur as they fly ;
There, in the stocks of trees, white fays do dwell,
And span-long elves that dance about a pool,
With each a little changeling in their arms ;
And airy spirits play with falling stars,
And mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon ;
While she sits reading by the glow-worm's light,
Or rotten wood o'er which the worm hath crept,
The baneful schedule of her nocent charms,
And binding characters, through which she wounds
Her puppets, the sigilla of her witchcraft."

It is this fragment of the Sad Shepherd which shows us the
versatility of Ben Jonson's genius. The same hand that wrote
the stiff, frigid, pompous declamations that are to be found in
Sejanus and Catiline, could produce verse such as this, and verse

CHAP, x.]

BEET JONSON.

255

which in its simple sweetness is rivalled only by that of Beaumont and Fletcher—
" Though I am young and cannot tell
Either what Death or Love is well,
Yet I have heard they both bear darts,
And both do aim at human hearts."

He could write the fervent simple love scenes between Maid
Marian and Kobin Hood—
"I'll grow to your embraces, till two souls
Distilled into kisses through our lips,
Do make one spirit of love,"—
where passion is unmixed with that philosophic reflection and
analysis of the nature of Love, found in the love scenes of the
Poetaster and in The New Inn. One cannot help wishing that
the simplicity of pure unmixed feeling, which is so characteristic
of his genius in the Sad Shepherd, had distinguished it also in
the romances of his other plays. The failure of the love scenes
between Ovid and Julia in the Poetaster is emphasized by the
comparisons they suggest between this play and that most
passionate of all of Shakspere's plays, Borneo and Juliet, and
one instinctively compares the abandoned passion of Romeo
with the frigid reasoning of Ovid. Julia, at night, calls to
Ovid from her window; she wishes for Death, because after
Death their souls can have that life together which Life denies
them. Ovid replies—•
'' 0 stay, my love ; the hopes thou dost conceive
Of thy quick death, and of thy future life,
Are not authentical. Thou choosest death
So thou mightst joy thy love in the other life.
But know, my princely love, when thou art dead,
Thou only must survive in perfect soul;
And in the soul are no affections :
"We pour out our affections with our blood;
And with our blood's affections fade our loves.
No life hath love in such sweet state as this ;
No essence is so dear to moody sense,
As flesh and blood, whose quintessence is sense.
Beauty composed of flesh and blood moves more
And is more plausible to blood and flesh
Than spiritual beauty can be to the spirit.
Such apprehension as we have in dreams
(When sleep, the bond of senses, locks them up),
Such shall we have when death destroys them quite,
If love be then thy object, change not life."

256

BEN JONSON.

[CITAP. X,

This same pedantic attitude of mind is specially characteristic
of The New Inn or The Light, where Jonson's views on the nature
of ideal love are fully stated. To Lovel, the hero of this
comedy—
" All thoughts, all passions, all delights
That stir this mortal frame,
Are but the messengers of Love,
And feed his secret flame."

" There is no life on earth, he says, but being in love; there are no
studies, no delights, no business, no intercourse, no trade of sense or
soul." Then he proceeds to answer the question, " What is Love,"
and although the definitions do real and infinite credit to
Jonson's morality, so ideal in an age when Love was corrupted
and debased, yet he lacks, as Mr. Ward says, " t h e Miltonic
afflatus with which to wing this noble morality :"—
" Love is a spiritual coupling of two souls,
So much more excellent as it least relates
Unto the body ; circular, eternal;
Not feign'd or made but born ; and then so precious
As nought can value it but itself; so free,
As nothing can command it but itself.
And in itself so round and liberal,
As, where it favours, it bestows itself.
But we must take and understand this love,
Along still as a name of dignity,
Not pleasure.
True love hath no unworthy thought, no light,
Loose, unbecoming appetite, or strain;
But fixed, constant, pure, immutable.
And love is never true that is not lasting,
No more than any can be pure or perfect
That entertains more than one object."

Not the nobility of Jonson's morality but his consciousness
of it was the snare of his genius. His great sense of moral
superiority to his age, though this superiority was real not
imagined, gave him too much of the attitude of a teacher, to
allow of his being a truly great artist: it caused him to disfigure
his work by suggestions of egoism and arrogance, which characterised only too forcibly his strong personality.
Yet Ben
Jonson has great claims to the memory and admiration of
posterity, not only because he possessed, in common with other
artists of his great age, a various many-sided imaginative
nature, with the capacity for expressing itself in rich and abun-

CHAP. X.]

BEN JONSON.

257

dant language, but because, in addition to this, he influenced
powerfully the development of the drama. And thus, not only
by his theory of comic characterisation, which, though crude,
did much to reform the comic stage, giving to it the idea of
interest in character, replacing that which belongs to a lower
stage of art, viz. interest in incident alone; but by his conscientious work and high aims as a dramatist, he gave a true
and high ideal to dramatic art and the dramatic profession,—an
ideal to which the genius of Shakspere had unconsciously
conformed, and which, although neglected by Jonson's successors,
will always remain the true one of a great national drama.

s

C H A P T E R XL
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHEK.

FLETCHER, JOHN, lorn December 1579; went to Bene't College, Cambridge,
1591.
BEAUMONT, FKANCIS, lorn probably 1585 ; went for a short time to
Broadgate's Hall, Oxford ; entered the Inner Temple, 1600. Probably a few years later the friendship between the two poets began.
Beaumont died 1616; Fletcher died 1625. Principal works written :—
(1) By FLETCHER alone—The Faithful Shepherdess, prob. by 1610 ;
The Loyal Sulject, 1618; (?) Bonduca, before 1619 ; (?) Valentinian,
before 1619 ; The Pilgrim, first acted 1621 ; The Wild Goose Chase,
1621 ; The Custom of the Country, before 1628 ; The Elder Brother,
acted after 1625; (?) Nice Valour, or the Passionate Madman, about
1624.
(2) By BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, together—(?) The Woman Hater,

acted 1606-07 ; Philaster, circ. 1608 ; The Maid's Tragedy, circ. 1610 ;
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, circ. 1611 ; Cupid's Revenge, 1612 ;
(?) The Honest Man's Fortune, 1613 ; Four Plays in One, before 1616 ;
(?) Thierry and Theodoret, before 1616.

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER lived when the more glorious phase

of the Elizabethan had passed away—when men were no longer
stirred and excited—when their emotions were no longer stimulated and purified by great events and great crises which broke
through the crust of convention, and called forth the real
humanity underneath.
They lived when the large national
life had been superseded by the mean grovelling politics of
James I.'s Court, at variance alike with the interests and instincts of the nation,—when a cultivated Court which had
surrounded and worshipped Gloriana, the perfect queen, idealised by fervid imaginations, had given place to profligate and
illiterate courtiers, dealing out shameless flattery to a weak and
unimpressive king. Cowardice and self-seeking had taken the
place in political life of bravery and patriotism, and belief in the
national capabilities: a time of depression, the inevitable reaction
following on an eager life lived at high pressure, had come : the

CHAP, X L ]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

259

enthusiasm that had prompted heroic and great deeds and
emotions had not only passed away, but had given place to a
scepticism which scoffed at its very existence, and which justified
itself at the expense of belief in the nobler side of humanity. I t
is of such an age that Beaumont and Fletcher are the representatives : their works are a truthful reflection of its thoughts
and feelings, of its attitude towards life and the world: they
recognise the existence and the power of emotions which
play on the surface of life, but of impersonal enthusiasms and
of the deepest and grandest feelings of human nature they
have no conception. It is said that the truly great, whether
in science or art, are always above their age; that they are
unconsciously its teachers; that their vision is not the commonplace one of the ordinary mortal, but the ideal one of a
prophet, the vision of what the human race might be, of
what it might some day attain. All our greatest men, artists or
not, have been raised above the world to which they appealed,
by a point of view to which they have been always faithful,
which has made the platform from which they have spoken to
their fellow-men. But among these men Beaumont and Fletcher
cannot be ranked. They indeed emerge above the mass of their
contemporaries, but they are not distinguished by virtue of their
insight into the deeper currents and problems of life; their poetry
is not " the finer breath of life :" it is too much the breath of the
coarse, degenerate age in which they lived. What made the
source of their popularity with their age and of their interest
with ours, is their intense sense of the picturesque situations
which this life offered,—situations which brought out the more
obvious pathos and tragedy of life, which called forth the tenderness, the self-devotion, the real passions and feelings of men and
women, their power of telling a story, and above all their power
of giving the most graceful, charming, and musical expression to
the feelings and thoughts of their characters. Their view of their
own age is vivid, glowing, and intense; all that they comprehend
they feel; they share their age's want of aspiration, its scepticism,
but it is a scepticism which brings no pain or bitterness with it,
because their soul is filled with the surface interest of life—it
affords them all the satisfaction they require. There is about
their work a truthfulness to human nature as they conceive it,
a reality in their treatment of the limited emotions they comprehend, and a genius in the capacity for simple sweet expression,
which will always give them a decided place among artists.
They had no theory about their art, like Ben Jonson. They

260

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

wrote, and this is the secret of the excellence of their style,
because they felt impelled to write for the sake of writing; both
of them were men of good position, who had no need to seek
their fortune as playwrights. To them, as they express it in
the Triumph of Love—
"Sweet poetry's
Aflower,where men like bees and spiders may
Bear poison, or else sweets and wax away;
Be venom-bearing spiders they that will,
I'll be the bee, and suck the honey still,"
Poetry, to them, was the result of nature : it came by natural
process \ it was not that elaborate structure of art as conceived by
the highminded but self-conscious Jonson.
It was because neither Beaumont nor Fletcher possessed
genius of the first order, that their partnership was so possible
and so complete. Great genius implies a strong and marked individuality in its possessor ; " it is a divinity which doth hedge "
even one great genius from another; but genius such as that of
Beaumont and Fletcher has its points of view in common; it
showed itself in this case capable of a partnership so intimate
as to succeed in baffling the subtlest analysis aiming at distinguishing mind from mind. Commentators have spent a vast
amount of energy and ingenuity in attempting the distinction;
some speak of Beaumont's judgment, of Fletcher's fancy, of
"Fletcher's keen treble and deep Beaumont's bass," but it is
impossible to discern any tangible difference between their work :
they are rather " the two full congenial souls, twin stars that roll
round Shakspere's sun." Differences of individuality there must
have been, but none so decided as to make it possible to distinguish the work of one from the other. Perhaps, as one
commentator says, the plays that Fletcher wrote alone are
less moral than those which he wrote with Beaumont, and his
diction when writing alone is perhaps more exaggerated in its
tendencies; his verse has more feminine endings, is sweeter,
more tender, and therefore more liable to the faults of weakness
and feebleness, than it was when he wrote in conjunction with
Beaumont. The Elizabethan stage was very familiar with the
idea of dramatic partnership, though probably none so intimate
had before occurred; Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,
Middleton, and Wm. Kowley, had all known what it was to
work in partnership. As Mr. Ward says, they either worked
with one another, or made additions to old plays, eking out the
labour of fellow dramatists, till it was not known where the work

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

261

of one began and that of the other ended; but this partnership
of Beaumont and Fletcher's, so complete, moved the wonder and
admiration even of their age—
'' Both for both, not semi wits :
Each piece is wholly two, yet never splits :
Ye are not two faculties and one soul still
He the understanding, thou the quick free-will
But as two voices in one song embrace,
Fletcher's keen treble and deep Beaumont's bass.
Two full congenial souls : still both prevailed,
His house and thine were quartered not impaled."

Mr. Ward in calmer prose says, " I t is my belief that Beaumont and Fletcher were both dramatic poets of sufficiently high
ability to be able to work as equals, and to conceive in thorough
harmony with each other what in certain points of form they
may have to a great degree executed independently. Neither of
them was so great that a fusion of their creative powers was impossible, or so small that they intentionally avoided it."
Both were cultivated men of tolerably high social rank.
Fletcher, born 1579, was the son of a man who was successively
President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, minister of Rye in Sussex,
Dean of Peterboro', Bishop of Bristol, and Bishop of London.
Fletcher inherited from his father half his books; and perhaps
the traditions of his family did much in stimulating him to a
literary career; a paternal uncle, Giles, was a writer of travels;
his cousins Phineas and Giles were conspicuous in literature,
the former being the author of the Purple Island, and also of a
less well-known work, a drama called Socelides. After being
pensioner at Bene't College, Cambridge, in 1591, and in 1593
becoming Bible clerk there, Fletcher finally devoted himself to
the dramatic profession. We hear of him first as a dramatic
author in 1607. Dryden says that it was in 1608 that Beaumont
and Fletcher made their first successful joint essay in Philaster,
but it is quite possible that they may have made previously some
less successful dramatic attempts together; probably the WomanHater, brought out 1606 or 1607, was written in co-operation.
Beaumont came also of a cultivated stock. His brother John,
whose works are lost to posterity, must have had some claim to
fame, for he earned by his poems the commendation of Jonson,
and the title of brother-poet from Drayton. His college career
at Broadgate's Hall, Oxford, was short. Between 1600 and the
time of his entrance into the dramatic profession, he lived as a
lawyer in the Inner Temple, apparently devoting his attention
more to literature than to law; but from the beginning of his

262

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

partnership with Fletcher till his marriage in 1613, he lived with
his friend in the same house on the bank of the Thames, the
two sharing everything in common, " even the same clothes and
cloak," and showing, as a contemporary observes, a wonderful
" consimilarity " of fancy. Even in their personality they were
confused by their contemporaries, at least so we gather from the
indiscriminate criticism which is bestowed upon them. Shirley
says "they were upon every occasion as fluent to talk as a comedy."
Beaumont later became glorified by that burst of regretful praise
which always surrounds the man of promise who dies young;
but of Fletcher, who survived his friend many years, we have
details given in a calmer and more trustworthy spirit. He was,
we are told, remarkable for a certain sympathetic social tact,
which prevented him through life from making a single enemy;
he had a genuine friendship with one in whom he might easily
have found an aggressive rival: Ben Jonson was proud to call
Fletcher his son, and swore—and this was indeed high praise from
the egoistic dramatist—that Fletcher had outdone his great self.
It must have been the extreme modesty of Fletcher that allowed
him to be a friend of the great stage-reformer; and, indeed, his
contemporaries bear testimony to his genuine modesty, though
sometimes he forgot self in the artist's enthusiasm, on one occasion unconsciously joining in the applause which " that rare issue
of his brain," the Wild Goose Chase, called forth. But this little
outburst was no more the result of self-consciousness or egotism,
than were those feelings which in more unfortunate circumstances
prompted Charles Lamb to join in the hiss which banished his
comedy from the stage. And so Fletcher was called Jonson's
son and remained his friend; while Beaumont, who perhaps
had more self-assertion than was agreeable to the great egoist,
was severely criticised by him. " Francis Beaumont," he said,
" thinks too much of himself and his own poems."
Thirty-six plays were written by Fletcher alone: fourteen
others were probably written by Beaumont and Fletcher together.
Fletcher lived nine years after Beaumont; Beaumont dying in
1616, and Fletcher in 1625, and this, in addition to the fact
that Fletcher was the most rapid writer, accounts for the many
plays that we have written by Fletcher alone. No fundamental
differences can be discerned between these two groups of plays.
We find the same pathos, the same tragedy, the same sweet and
devoted characters in the plays written by Fletcher alone, as in
those he wrote with Beaumont: the verse is characterised by the
same qualities, sweetness, simplicity, and delicacy. Both use

CHAP, xr.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

263

feminine endings largely; they frequently added an eleventh
syllable; and, as Mr. Stopford Brooke says, they made dramatic
verse weaker in proportion as they made it more sweet and
delicate. However, in the hands of these two artists, in expressing
the rather overwrought and uncontrolled tender feelings and emotions with which they dealt, it could be charming because it was
suitable, but in the hands of degenerate disciples it became
weak and insipid : the innovation they made was a bad precedent
for a declining school. These tendencies were perhaps more
exaggerated by Fletcher than by Beaumont: he makes very
frequent use of the feminine ending, his lines often end with one,
sometimes with two, unaccented syllables. " H e frequently breaks
up the iambic feet of his lines into tribrachs, i.e. he uses threesyllabled instead of two-syllabled feet," thus occasionally sacrificing firmness to sweetness,—a sacrifice which, however, is sometimes admirable, as in The Pilgrim—
" How sweet these solitary places are, how wantonly
The wind blows through the leaves and courts and plays with 'em."
Fletcher's wonderful power of expression, his management of
sweet and delicate verses, have suggested comparison of him with
Shelley. But the resemblance is only in form. Fletcher has
not the spirituality, the refined ideal mind, of Shelley. Fletcher
has no aspirations—no comprehension of the larger and impersonal enthusiasm that animates Shelley's poetry. Shelley is
ennobling and powerful, where Fletcher is merely graceful and
insinuating. Their point of view was so different that, although
they possessed the same knack of handling verse, yet the resemblance between them must always remain superficial. Fletcher
has none of the depth of Shelley : what thrills Shelley as a profound grief would touch Fletcher with artistic pathos. The
feelings that animate Shelley's dirge, the cry of profound despair
and sorrow that calls to the " rough wind that moanest loud,"
to wail for the world's wrong, could not be understood by Fletcher.
Sorrow and pathos and despair were to him picturesque attributes, the material of the artist: he never felt, never conceived
or imagined, that there could be " a grief too sad for song."
To him madness is the only refuge of those whom the world
treats cruelly,—the unconsciousness of the spirit that has shaken
off its sanity, its sense of responsibility to the world around:
of the sufferings and joys and experiences of deep self-contained
natures Fletcher understood nothing. "Nothing's so dainty
sweet as lovely melancholy," he says in the lyric which has

264

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

the credit of perhaps suggesting to Milton his H Penseroso,
that poem of so much deeper significance—
" There's nought in this life sweet
If man were wise to see it,
But only melancholy,
Sweetest melancholy."
The wrongs and misfortunes of the world resolve themselves
into the pathos, sometimes rather querulous, of souls who have
been disappointed and deceived in their hopes; into the picturesque complaints of the disappointed lover, of the deceived
maiden, the mad despair of the thwarted.
Beautiful as are many of the passages in which Fletcher's
heroes and heroines bewail their unhappy lot, yet they cannot
give him a claim to that depth and dignity either of thought
or expression which always characterises the greatest poets and
artists, and thus there must ever be the widest gulf between
Fletcher and Shelley. Mr. Matthew Arnold cautions the student
of literature against that too wide toleration that may come with
culture: against admiration that lowers unconsciously its standard ; being impressed by beauty everywhere, forgetting to compare and adjust; that is carried uncritically away into the
atmosphere of the smaller artists, forgetting that it has ever
been in the larger world and seen with the deeper insight of the
great artist. And never is this caution more needed than in
reading Beaumont and Fletcher : so great is their power of taking
us into their atmosphere, so great their power of interesting us
in the story and fate of their picturesque characters, in making
us forget how limited, sometimes how debased, are their little
loves, their small sphere of hopes and fears. We must never
forget that, charming as they are, and picturesque as their point
of view often is, their verse has never the true ring of that of the
greatest artists. Neither of them could have understood or
expressed the spirit that speaks through the dying Hamlet to
Horatio, in which is concentrated all the tragedy of the whole
episode, and the profound self-contained misery of Hamlet?s soul—
" If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."
Beaumont and Fletcher had no doubt their finer moments,
when the higher aspects of life came before them and seemed
admirable, but if the deep insight of the true artist had been

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

265

consistently theirs, they could never have written such low, degraded plays, they could never have imagined so many sordid and
miserable characters. They were not true to their best moments;
but at times goodness, purity, and honesty seemed to them what was
most admirable in life. Some of Fletcher's most vigorous verses
were those in which he speaks of the true manliness, the " virtus,"
which meant so much in earlier Elizabethan days, the ideal of
the true "gentle-man" that had passed away,—of Sir Philip
Sidney and his generation. In Nice Valour his Duke says—
" I cannot make you gentlemen, that's a work
Raised from your own deservings ; merit, manners,
And inborn virtue does i t : let your own goodness
Make you so great, my power shall make you greater."

And the poem at the end of the comedy Upon an Honest
Man's Fortune is the genuine vigorous expression of his sense of
the dignity of human independence, of the weight of human
responsibility—
" Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Be honest is the only perfect man :
Commands all light, all influence, all fate :
Nothing to him falls early or too late :
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

He could conceive, but not sustain, the»somewhat nobly
eccentric character of Valentine in Wit without Money\ who holds
it monstrous men should feed their bodies and starve their understandings.
One of Fletcher's greatest failures is a play in which he
attempts to draw a thoroughly and consistently noble character :
his failure in this play, called The Loyal Subject, is made more
evident by the comparison that is naturally suggested between
it and Heywood's Royal King and Loyal Subject. The exaggerated virtue of Ordella in Thierry and Theodoret, a play which he
wrote in conjunction with Beaumont, awakens no interest: it is
an instance, though one not taken by Charles Lamb, who finds
interest in the character of Ordella, of " a flight of overstrained and
improbable virtue, which betrays an imperfect moral sensibility."
Morality and virtue are picturesque attributes which sometimes have their reward : for instance, in the Maid of the Mill,
a play in which Eowley had some part, the maid who is true to
her idea of duty has the same reward that Eichardson gives to
Pamela, viz. that of marrying the man who has done all he can

266

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

to turn her from it. This is the distorted idea of poetic justice
which he shared with the excellent novelist: but he has a sincere
regard for innocence and purity : they are some of the elements
of beauty, as in Viola and Honora, two characters in The Loyal
Subject—
" What a modesty dwells round about 'em,
And like a nipping morn pulls in their blossoms."
And in the Elder Brother—
" Andrew, she has a face looks like a story,
The story of the heavens looks very like her."
I t gives dignity to Celia in the Custom of the Country—
1
' I cannot love you,
"Without the breach of faith, I cannot hear you,
You hang upon my love like frosts on lilies ;
I can die, but I cannot love—
You are answered."

But with the exception of a few fine touches of this kind,
Fletcher is out of his sphere when he ventures to conceive an
ideally pure or noble person. They are unnatural and stiff: his
efforts remind one of those of the typical French novelist, who is
a genius if he keep within the sphere of what is apparently his
own unfortunate experience, who shows talent in his conception
and treatment of the character of the complex and civilised
villain, but is altogether at a loss when he wishes to rise to a
purer sphere. He cannot conceive goodness save as the result of
ignorance, and his good people are, without exception, crude,
unnatural, and wearisome.
But Fletcher shares with the French novelist the sense of the
artistic value of the nobler attributes of human nature in certain
crises of life. He has never made any study of a consistently
noble character, but experience has doubtless made him thrill in
response at moments when men have shown true nobility and
dignity, and those rarer, higher impulses of human nature which
even the worst life cannot utterly destroy. Charles Lamb gives
a scene from the Tragedy of Bonduca which suggests even
Shakspere in the dignity of its thought and expression. Bonduca is triumphing over the Romans, whom she has just defeated—
" A woman beat them, Nennius; a weak woman,
A woman, beat these Romans !"

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

267

Caratach, whom Fletcher, in defiance of history, makes the hero of
the episode of the tragedy, checks her. " So it seems," he says—
" A man would shame to talk so.
'Tis a truth
That Rome has fled "before us twice, and routed ;
A truth we ought to crown the gods for, lady,
And not our tongues."
If Bonduca think so meanly of the Komans, why does she so
glory in her conquest ?—
" Ye, all ye Romans, fearful, fleeing Romans,
Where is your conquest then ?
Why are your altars crown'd with wreaths of flowers ?
The beasts with gilt horns waiting for the fire ?
The holy Druides composing songs
Of everlasting life to victory ?
Bonduca. By the gods, I think
Ye dote upon these Romans, Caratach.
Caratach. Witness these wounds, I do ; they were fairly given :
I love an enemy ; I was born a soldier ;
. v
.
Ten struck battles
I suck'd these honour'd scars from, and all Roman;
Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches,
When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass
(And made it doubtful whether that or I
Were the more stubborn metal) have I wrought through,
And all to try these Romans. Ten times a night
I have swum the rivers, when the stars of Rome
Shot at me as I floated, and the billows
Tumbled their wat'ry ruins on my shoulders,
Charging my batter'd side with troops of agues ;
And still to try these Romans."
He has seen the Britons run before them—
" Not a lover's wish
E'er made the haste they did.
The light shadows
That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn,
Halted on crutches to them."
This is surely vigorous and dignified verse, showing that Fletcher
had conceptions of noble impulse and character. But sometimes
we find him, with characteristic carelessness of any standard,
either moral or artistic, spoiling a fine plot by his own coarse

268

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

additions—as, for instance, in the Custom of the Country, The
original episode is that of a mother who will not violate hospitality by betraying the murderer of her son; but Fletcher so
misunderstands the spirit of the story as to make her ultimately
marry the murderer.
A want of artistic self-control sometimes renders his plays
either painful or ridiculous—painful, as in A Wife for a Month,
in the outcries of the poisoned Alphonsus; ridiculous, as in the
Mad Lover, a warrior madly in love with the Princess Celia, and
who wishes literally to obey her wish and to leave his heart in
her hand : he does indeed, as one of the characters observes, go
" stupid mad." But there is pathos in the sad subdued madness of the gaoler's daughter in the Two Noble Kinsmen,
Fletcher's addition to this play, which he wrote in conjunction
with Shakspere, borrowing the plot from Chaucer's knight's
tale. She is in love with Palamon, of whom her father is in
charge. Like Ophelia, and like all blighted maidens of her
time, she wanders alone in the country, and would drown
herself did not her courage fail her. She longs " t o go to
the place of the blessed spirits, where are we maids that have
our hearts perish'd, crack'd to pieces with love : we shall come
there and do nothing all day long but pick flowers with
Proserpine."
Fletcher has to a certain limited extent the gift of comic
characterisation. There is humour in the conception of the
character of the old gentleman in The Pilgrim, who appears
quite sane till a storm at sea suddenly reveals the fact that he
thinks he is Neptune. There is humour in the character of the
lawyer in The Spanish Curate, who evidently regarded truth as
too sacred to be used on ordinary occasions. " I must have
witnesses," he says, " enough and ready "—
" Substantial, fearless souls, that will swear suddenly,
That will swear anything.
Clerk, They shall swear truth too.
L.
That's no great matter : for variety
They may swear truth."

Fletcher can not only tell a story, effectively bringing out its
dramatic points, but he can give us also the atmosphere of his
story, and make a living background for his personages. " I n
The Pilgrim," says Ward, " we are in an atmosphere of southern
romance—pilgrims, brigands, woods, and streams reproduced
with easy naturalness :" he shows the capacity for realising the

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

269

historic past, as in the Tragedy of Bonduca. He has the historic
spirit, though not the historic devotion to facts, for the episodes
he makes most of in this tragedy are but imaginative developments of hints given by Tacitus; for instance, he develops the
fate of the Eoman officer Poenius, slightly touched on by Tacitus,
into a number of striking scenes. And lastly, the Wild Goose
Chase shows him to be a master in the art of conducting brilliant
chatter; it is an instance of the truth of Dryden's criticism,
enunciated with eighteenth-century pomposity and decision—
" In witty dialogue is Fletcher's praise—
He moved the mind, but had not power to raise."
In the Faithful Shepherdess he displays strikingly the power of
moving the mind by the sweetness of his diction alone, " by the
sweet expression accompanied by sweet conceit . . . the familiar
language fashioned to the weight . . . of shepherds and the
shepherdesses who speak it."
The Faithful Shepherdess is Fletcher's masterpiece from the
point of view of diction; but it is absolutely valueless from that
of characterisation or plot. I t is thoroughly conventional in idea
and treatment. Fletcher makes no attempt to emancipate himself
from the conventionality of the pastoral. His pastoral, as he
says, "kis a representation of shepherds and shepherdesses with
their actions and passions, which must be such as may agree
with their nature, at least not exceeding former fictions and
vulgar traditions. They are not to be adorned with any but
such improper {i.e. not confined to the common) ones as nature
is said to bestow, such as singing and poetry, or such as experience may teach them, as the virtues of herbs and fountains, the
ordinary course of the sun, moon, and stars, and the like." He
makes no attempt to introduce any more vigorous or robust
element; he makes no attempt to give it a healthy reality, as
Ben Jonson had done by connecting it with national legend; but
the simplicity, and purity and sweetness of his diction, allowed
the pastoral in his hands to come very near, in expression at
least, to the ideal of rural and idyllic poetry, though a man of
his temperament and ideas could never have that enthusiasm and
reverence for Nature, that devotion to her as the one worthy
inspiration of life, which is the motive of the true pastoral poet.
The slender thread of plot that binds the monotonous incidents of the conventional pastoral life together is in this case
the loves of Amoret, the faithful shepherdess, and Perigot; a love
which Amaryllis, another shepherdess, who herself is in love with

270

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER,

[CHAP. XI.

Perigot, endeavours to trouble and ruin. Over the whole conduct of the action reigns Clorin, a holy shepherdess, the embodiment of purity and constancy : she appears in the first scene as
having buried her dead love and vowing eternal fidelity over his
grave. She is loved for her constancy and purity by Thenot:
he is devoted to her for the sake of these qualities, and she loses
for him her charm and attraction when, in pity for his love-lorn
condition, she pretends to respond to his love and to be faithless
to her dead shepherd. Connected with the plot, though by no
means inwoven in it, are the characters of a bad shepherd,
Alexis, and a bad shepherdess, Chloe, together with incidents of
their uncalled-for career. They are both, as Charles Lamb says,
moral and artistic blots. Other personages in this pastoral
world are a priest of Pan, a river-god, a satyr sent by Pan to
direct the wandering shepherds aright, and who bears the same
relation to the plot of Fletcher's play as the attendant spirit does
to that of Milton's Comus. There is in the piece no plot, no
characterisation, no significance,—yet the Faithful Shepherdess
will always be one of the honoured English classics, because of
the almost perfect grace of some of its diction and the charm
of its lyrics. Here and there, in the troubled course of the true
love of Amoret and Perigot, there are passages of true poetic
feeling,—the cry of Amoret, when she sees herself doubted by
Perigot—
" Let me be made a reed and ever mute
Nod to the water's fall, while every blast
Sings thro' my slender leaves that I was chaste ; "

in Perigot's grief when he thinks he can no longer believe in the
truth and fidelity of Amoret—
" Night, do not steal away ! I woo thee yet
To hold a hard hand o'er the rusty bit
That guides the lazy team. Go back again,
Bootes, thou that drivest the frozen wain
Round as a ring, and bring a second night
To hide my sorrow from the coming light; "

in Thenot's address to the polar star, which in its cold bright
distant light brings back to him the memory of his shepherdess—
" Thou blessed star, I thank thee for thy light,
Thou by whose power the darkness of sad night
Is banish'd from the earth, in whose dull place
Thy chaster beams play on the heavy face

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

271

Of all the world, making the blue sea smile
To see how cunningly thou dost beguile
Thy brother of his brightness, giving day
Again from chaos : whiter than that way
That leads to Jove's high court, and chaster far
Than chastity itself."
These two last passages, by their greater elaborateness, not
quite consistent with the spirit of the pastoral, suggest that
significant and stately creation of Milton's, for which Fletcher's
pastoral is supposed to have afforded hints and suggestions.
" The lazy team of Bootes " is, in Milton's Comus, the
"drowsy flight'd steeds,
That draw the litter of close-curtain'd sleep."
But if, in stately imagery, in more dignified verse, Milton is
Fletcher's successful rival, yet in the poetry, which is essentially
the poetry of pastoral art,—in simple, sweet, and spontaneous
verse,—Fletcher far surpasses Milton.
The song of the satyr, bearing the wounded Alexis—
" Softly gliding as I go
With this burden full of woe
Thro' still silence of the night
Guided by the glow-worm's light,
Hither am I come at last.
Many a thicket have I passed ;
Not a twig that durst deny me,
Not a bush that durst descry me,
To the little bird that sleeps
On the tender spray : nor creeps
That hardy worm with pointed tail
But if I be under sail,
Flying faster than the wind,
Leaving all the clouds behind,
But doth hide her tender head
In some hollow tree or bed
Of seeded nettles ; not a hare
Can be started from his fare
By my footing ; nor a wish
Is more sudden, nor a fish
Can be found with greater ease,
Cut the vast unbounded seas,
Leaving neither print nor sound,
Than I, when nimbly on the ground
I measure many a league an hour ; "
the song of the priest, the warning to fold the flocks, that night
is coming—

272

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER,

[CHAP. XI.

" See the dewdrops how they kiss
Every little flower that is
Hanging on their velvet heads
Like a rope of crystal beads ; "

the song of the river-god, who saves the wounded Amoret,
thrown into his spring—
" Fear not him that succour'd thee,
I am this fountain's god ! Below
My waters to a river grow,
And 'twixt two banks with osiers set,
That only prosper in the wet,
Thro' the meadows do they glide,
"Wheeling still on every side,
Sometimes winding round about,
To find the evenest channel out.
And if thou wilt go with me,
Leaving mortal company,
In the cool stream shalt thou lie
Free from harm as well as I :
I will give thee for thy food
No fish that useth in the mud ;
But trout and pike, that love to swim
Where the gravel from the brim
Thro' the pure streams may be seen :
Orient pearl fit for a queen,
Will I give, thy love to win,
And a shell to keep them in."
Amoret's reply. " For thy kindness to me shown,
Never from thy banks be blown
Any tree, with windy force,
Cross thy streams, to stop thy course
May no beast that comes to drink,
With his horns cast down thy brink
May none that for thy fish do look
Cut thy banks to dam thy brook :
Barefoot may no neighbour wade
In thy cool streams, wife or maid
When the spawn on stones do lie
To wash their hemp, and spoil the fry."—
are all pieces of verse which are admirably fitted to express the
true idea of t h e pastoral.
This verse has indeed none of t h e dignity and stateliness of
Milton's pastoral verse, none of t h e solemn, appealing tone as in
t h e address to Sabrina, daughter of Locrine—
" Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

CHAP, si.]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

273

In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-coloured hair ;
Listen for dear honour's sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save."
There is none of the almost oriental splendour of Sabrina's
song of her dwelling—
" Thick set with agate, and the azurn sheen
Of Turkis blue, and emerald green,"
Of the spirit's song to Sabrina—
" May thy billows roll ashore
The beryl and the golden ore;
May thy lofty head be crowned
With many a tower and terrace round,
And here and there thy banks upon
With groves of myrrh and cinnamon."
And there may perhaps be more absolute beauty in Milton's
verse, but if we take into consideration the ideal of the pastoral,
and the fitness and adaptability of Fletcher's verse to this form
of art, we must feel that the Faithful Shepherdess, as far as the
execution is concerned, is a triumph of pastoral art. Milton is
too splendid: and his verse, when it is not loaded with gorgeous imagery, is too weighty with meaning : it is not adapted to
a form of art which aims both in thought and expression at
simplicity and sweetness.
The Tragedy of Thierry, King of France, and of his brother
Theodoret, it is impossible to assign definitely either to Fletcher
alone or to Beaumont and Fletcher working together. "Fletcher's hand," says Mr. Ward, " i s visible in the versification
. . . upon the whole I should be inclined to follow Dyce in
regarding Dailey's view as not improbable, according to which
Thierry and Theodoret, though not brought out till after Beaumont's death, may have been planned, and partly or wholly
written, with his co-operation before." Whatever be the nature
of its authorship this play contains one of the finest scenes that
distinguish the drama of Beaumont and Fletcher, a scene that
has all the distinctive merits of the later Elizabethan drama,
deep feeling, and an intense pathos, which rise successfully
above the horrors and exaggerations of coarse and uninteresting plot. Brunhalt, the Queen of Austrasia, whose wickedness
is as overdrawn and unnatural as is the goodness and innocence
of Ordella, the wife of Thierry, having poisoned her husband in
T

274

BEAUMONT ASTD FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

order t o keep t h e government in her hands, finds i t necessary to
remove her sons Thierry and Theodoret, who have grown u p to
be obstacles to her a m b i t i o n ; she irritates Thierry against
Theodoret till t h e quarrel becomes violent, and Thierry kills
Theodoret. B r u n h a l t t h e n poisons Thierry. I t is his dying
speech, which is so powerful in its m i x t u r e of agony and p a t h o s —
"Tell me,
Can ever these eyes more, shut up in slumbers,
Assure my soul there is sleep 1 Is there night
And rest for human labours ? Do not you
And all the world, as I do, outstare Time,
And live, like funeral lamps, never extinguish'd ?
Is there a grave ? and in that grave
Is there a hope I shall sleep ? Can I die ?
Are not my miseries immortal ? oh !
The happiness of him that drinks his water,
After the weary day, and sleeps for ever !
Why do you crucify me thus with faces,
And gaping strangely upon one another ;
When shall I rest ?
Well, I will die,
In spite of all your potions ! one of you sleep ;
Lie down and sleep here, that I may behold
What blessed rest it is my eyes are robb'd of!—•
See ; he can sleep, sleep anywhere, sleep now,
When he that wakes for him can never slumber !
Is it not a dainty ease ?
Doctor. Your grace shall feel it.
Thierry. 0 never, never I ! the eyes of heaven
See but their certain motions, and then sleep :
The rages of the ocean have their slumbers,
And quiet silver calms : each violence
Crowns in his end a peace : but my fixed fires
Shall never, never set! "
And he t u r n s to his m o t h e r —
" 0, mother, do not lose your name ! forget not
This touch of nature in your tenderness !
'Tis all the soul of woman, all the sweetness :
Forget not, I beseech you, what are children,
How you have groaned for them ; to what love
They are born inheritors, with what care kept;
And, as they are rife to ripeness, still remember
How they imp out your age ! and when Time calls you,
That as an autumn flower you fall, forget not
How round about your hearse they hang, like pennons."
Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, written by both Beaumont
and Fletcher, seems to have been t h e most popular of their plays.

CHAP, xi.]

BEAUMONT AND ELETCHEK.

275

The plot turns on an incident which always excited and interested
an audience of those days. Euphrasia, daughter of Dion, a nobleman at the court of the King of Sicily, disguises herself as a page
in order to devote herself to Philaster. " Our ancestors," says
Charles Lamb, "seem to have been wonderfully delighted by
these transformations of sex." Later there came in a reaction
against this fancy, so romantic and generally so successful in
idea, so hazardous and unpleasing in practice. We find the poet
Donne dissuading his mistress from a resolution she had taken,
apparently stimulated by plays, to follow him abroad as a page.
" Temper, 0 fair love, love's impetuous rage,
Be my true mistress : not my feigned page."

Euphrasia, as the page Bellario, is a very good specimen of
Beaumont and Fletcher's ideal of womanhood. She is tender,
faithful, and devoted to Philaster, with a devotion which suffices
for itself and craves no return. Indeed, as Mr. Ward remarks,
it is unpleasing to find that at the end of the play the sweet
and pathetic Euphrasia is left uncared for. She has served
Philaster patiently and devotedly; she knows that Philaster loves
Arethusa, daughter of the king, and she helps him in his love by
becoming page to Arethusa, and carrying secretly his messages and
tokens; for their intercourse is obliged to be concealed, because
Philaster is hated and suspected at court as being the rightful
king unjustly excluded; and Arethusa, to further her father's
ambitious plans, is to be betrothed to the Spanish prince. The
self-sacrifice of love can go no further, and when by a just revolution Philaster is placed on the throne and openly betrothed to
Arethusa, and the patient Euphrasia is left desolate, it is felt
that poetic justice has been violated. It is the sweet, simple,
and devoted character of Euphrasia that makes the spirit of the
play and characterises the best of its diction, which is remarkable for an extreme simplicity, sometimes mixed with a quiet
pathos, such as that which dignifies Euphrasia's answer to
Philaster—
" Oh, but thou dost not know
"What 'tis to die.
"Yes, I do know, my lord ;
'Tis less than to be born : a lasting sleep ;
A quiet resting from all jealousy ;
A thing we all pursue. I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost."

276

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

Sometimes the verse has the idyllic sweetness and freshness
of the pastoral, as when Philaster tells the princess Arethusa
how he first found the boy Bellario—
" I have a boy, sent by the gods,
Not yet seen in the court. Hunting the buck,
I found him sitting by the fountain side,
Of which he borrow'd some to quench his thirst,
And paid the nymph again as much in tears.
A garland lay him by, made by himself,
Of many flowers, bred in the bay,
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness
Delighted me : but ever when he turn'd
His tender eyes upon them he would weep,
As if he meant to make them grow again.
Seeing such pretty helpless innocence
Dwell in his face, I ask'd him all his story.
He told me that his parents gentle died,
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields,
Which gave him roots : and of the crystal springs,
"Which did not stop their courses : and the sun,
Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light.
Then took he up his garland, and did show
What every flower, as country people hold,
Did signify ; and how all order'd thus,
Express'd his grief: and, to my thoughts, did read
The prettiest lecture of his country art
That could be wish'd, so that, methought, I could
Have studied it. I gladly entertain'd him,
Who was as glad to follow : and have got
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy,
That ever master kept. Him will I send
To wait on you, and bear our hidden love."

But it is the Maid}s Tragedy which, from among all the plays
of Beaumont and Fletcher, should be singled out as not only
showing the genius of these two artists at its height, but as embodying, in the conception of some of its characters and in their
expression, what is most distinctive of, and most beautiful in,
the later Elizabethan drama. In some of the speeches of Aspatia
there is all the wild pathetic passion of the self-devoted woman,
the feminine ideal of the later Elizabethans, wrho has been
deceived and wronged, but whose love cannot be shaken; and
the words of Evadne, the second heroine of the play, are animated
by that sterner and bitterer spirit, a feeling of horror and remorse,
at the wreck that passion uncontrolled could make of life.
Aspatia has been betrothed to Amintor, but the king desiring
him to marry Evadne, he breaks his promise to Aspatia and
marries Evadne. The character of Amintor is hopelessly weak

CHAP, X L ]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

277

and contemptible. Amintor is supposed to obey his sovereign's
demand as divine law. Such a servile character of a hero could
then only have been drawn by "high-flying passive-obedience
Tories." In the early Elizabethan days, when there was an
ideal halo surrounding the royal head, such behaviour might
have been understood. But no such chivalrous feeling animated
either the theory or the practice of the courtiers of James I.,
loyalty meant utter and undignified servility; and Amintor's
exceeding pliability, his forgetfulness of Aspatia, his delight
in Evadne, in obedience to the royal command, give him no
claim to human dignity and respect. We generally find him
suffering all the horrors of a weak remorse for the crimes which
his excessive obedience had caused him to commit. It detracts
from the impressiveness of Aspatia's sorrow to know that he was
the cause of it, and the object of her love. Aspatia is first introduced to us as the ordinary love-sick maiden, delighting in tears
and solitude, and melancholy fancies—
"This lady
Walks discontented, with, her watery eyes
Bent on the earth. The unfrequented woods
Are her delight : and when she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell
Her servants what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in ; and make her maids
Pluck them, and strew her over like a corse.
She carries with her an infectious grief,
That strikes all her beholders ; she will sing
The mournful'st things that ever ear hath heard
And sigh and sing again ; and when the rest
Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood,
Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room
With laughter, she will, with so sad a look,
Bring forth a story of the silent death
Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief
Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end,
She'll send them weeping, one by one, away."

It is Aspatia who speaks the lines which have become so
well known as a little ballad of forsaken love—
" Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew ;
Maidens, willow branches bear ;
Say I died true.
'' My love was false, but I was firm
From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie,
Lightly, gentle earth !"

278

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

But Aspatia is most truly impressive and touching in the
scene where she sits surrounded by her maidens. She wishes
them to be sad, because she is so—
" Come, let's be sad, my girls !
That downcast of thine eye, Olympia,
Shows a fine sorrow. Mark, Antiphila ;
Just such another was the nymph (Enone,
When Paris brought home Helen. Now a tear ;
And then thou art a piece expressing fully
The Carthage queen, when, from a cold sea rock,
Full with her sorrow, she tied fast her eyes
To the fair Trojan ships ; and, having lost them,
Just as thine eyes do, down stole a tear. Antiphila,
What would this wench do, if she were Aspatia ?
Here she would stand, till some more pitying god
Turn'd her to marble ! 'Tis enough, my wench !
Show me the piece of needlework you wrought.
Antiphila. Of Ariadne, madam ?
Asp.
Yes, that piece.—
This should be Theseus ; he has a cozening face :
You meant him for a man ?
Ant.
He was so, madam.
Asp.
Why, then, 'tis well enough. Never look back :
You have a full wind, and a false heart, Theseus !
Does not the story say, his keel was split,
Or his masts spent, or some kind rock or other
Met with his vessel ?
Ant.
Not as I remember.
Asp.
I t should have been so ; could the gods know this,
And not, of all their number, raise a storm ?
But they are all as ill. This false smile was well express'd,
Just such another caught me ; you shall not go so, Antiphila,
In this place work a quicksand
And over it a shallow smiling water,
And his ship ploughing it, and then a Fear.
Do that Fear to the life, wench.
Ant.
'Twill wrong the story.
Asp.
'Twill make the story, wrong'd by wanton poets,
Live long and be believed ; but where's the lady ?
Ant.
There, madam.
Asp.
Fie! you have miss'd it here, Antiphila,
You are much mistaken, wench ;
These colours are not dull and pale enougb,
To show a soul so full of misery
As this sad lady's was ; "
And then in lines which are the finest that Beaumont and Fletcher
ever wrote, which breathe all the sorrow and despair of a passionate and forsaken soul, she tells her maidens to look at her
for the model of deserted Ariadne—

CHAP, X L ]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

279

" D o it by me,
Do it by me the lost Aspatia,
And you shall find all true but the wild island.
I stand upon the sea-beach now, and think
Mine arms thus, and mine hair blown with the wind,
Wild as that desert, and let all about me
Tell that I am forsaken, do my face
(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)
Thus, thus, Antiphila, strive to make me look
Like Sorrow's monument; and the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges, and, behind me,
Make all a desolation."
The finest words of Evadne, the second heroine of the play,
are somewhat marred as being called forth by the reproaches of
Amintor, who weakly accuses her of having been false to him.
"Thou has brought me," he says,
" t o that dull calamity,
To that strange misbelief of all the world,
And all things that are in it, that I fear
I shall fall like a tree, and find a grave,
Only remembering that I grieve."
Evadne's true remorse gives her more dignity in her selfreproach than Amintor, " the noble youth, the soul as white as
heaven," could ever possess. " I am soul-sick," she says,
'' And wither with the fear of one condemned
Till I have got your pardon."
And when Amintor offers her his forgiveness and future trust,
she says—
" I have done nothing good to win belief,
My life hath been so faithless. All the creatures,
Made for heaven's honours, have their ends, and good ones,
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women !
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; and when they die, like tales
Ill-told and unbelieved, they pass away,
And go to dust forgotten ! but, my lord,
These short days I shall number to my rest
. . . shall, though too late,
Though in my evening, yet perceive a will;
Since I can do no good, because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
I will redeem one minute of my age,
Or like another Niobe, I'll weep
Till I am water."

280

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. XI.

The readers of the Maid's Tragedy and of Philaster cannot
doubt that Beaumont and Fletcher's work is often animated by
real and true feeling, sometimes finding splendid expression.
And we have proof of their capacity for humour in the play of
the Knight of the Burning Pestle, probably a joint composition,
though some critics would assign it to Fletcher alone. It is a very
clever parody on the heroic dramas and tales of the past age,
probably suggested by Don Quixote. Its satire had also a
second and more immediate point, as being directed against the
military ardour of the city trainbands. For this reason it was
probably not very well received at first, when the military talent
of the citizens of London was struggling and unrecognised;
but at the Eestoration, after an interval, in which the city
trainbands had established their reputation in the civil war, its
ridicule could be harmless and amusing. The Knight of the
Burning Pestle is Balph, apprentice to a citizen grocer. He has
read many novels, among others Palmerin of England, and is
fired with a desire for adventure and chivalrous experiences.
To his attendant apprentices, he says, " My beloved squire, and
George my dwarf, I charge you that from henceforth you never
call me by any other name but the right courteous and valiant
Knight of the Burning Pestle: and that you never call any
female by the name of woman or wench, but fair lady, if she
have her desires; if not, distressed damsel: that you call all
forests and heaths deserts, and all horses palfreys."
He is fortunate to meet with a " distressed damsel" at the
very outset of his travels, and he then proceeds to take a tremendous oath—
" My trusty dwarf and friend, reach me my shield,
And hold it while I swear first by my knighthood,
Then by the soul of Amadis de Gaul
(My famous ancestor) ; then by my sword,
The beauteous Brionella girt about me,
By this bright burning pestle, of mine honour
The living trophy, and by all respect
Due to distressed damsels: here I vow
Never to end the quest of this fair lady
And that forsaken squire, till by my valour
I gain their liberty."

No material inconvenience can check his chivalrous spirit and
his belief in a fortune that favours the brave—
" I have but one horse, upon which shall ride
This lady fair behind me, and before

CHAP. XL]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

281

This courteous squire. Fortune will give us more
Upon our next adventure."

And how a determined imagination can cast a glamour over the
trivialities of life is shown by the aspect in which the barber
presents himself to Ralph and the excited host—
" Not far from hence, near to a craggy cliff,
At the north end of this distracted town,
There doth stand a lowly house
Ruggedly builded, and in it a cave
In which an ugly giant now doth won (dwell)
Ycleped Barbarossa : in his hand
He shakes a naked lance of purest steel,
With sleeves turn'd up : and him before he wears
A motley garment to preserve his clothes
From blood of those knights which he massacres
And ladies' gent; without the door doth hang
A copper bason, on a prickant spear;
At which no sooner gentle knight can knock
But the shrill sound fierce Barbarossa hears,
And rushing forth brings in the errant knight,
And sets him down in an enchanted chair ;
Then with an engine which he hath prepared
With forty teeth, he claws his courtly crown ;
Next makes him wink, and underneath his chin
He plants a brazen piece, of mighty bore,
And knocks his bullets round about his cheeks ;
Whilst with his fingers and an instrument
With which he snaps his hair off, he doth fill
The wretch's ears with a most hideous noise."

And not only have Beaumont and Fletcher in the play
parodied the heroic ardour and valour of chivalrous novels and
dramas,—Ralph's first speech is a parody on a passage in
Shakspere's Henry IV., Act i. Scene 1, his last a parody on
the opening speech of the ghost of Andrea in the Spanish
Tragedy,—but they have carried their impartiality to an heroic
extent and have parodied themselves. Luce, who believes in
Jasper through everything, is hardly distinguishable from many
of the heroines of their other plays, who sacrifice everything to
love; devoting themselves, without reward or hope, even when
they have ceased to believe in those they love. The gift of
humour would be a dangerous one to men like Beaumont and
Fletcher, sceptical as they naturally were concerning the deeper
feelings and meanings of life. Happily the age did not call for
that cynical laughter which plays over everything and which
finds nothing sacred. This was the spirit of the stage after the

282

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

[CHAP. xr.

Bestoration, but before there was still some memory left of
the serious and deep feelings of the best Elizabethan time
Parodies and the jeer of scepticism amused, but the age had
belief still in the reality of some of its emotions, and it required
that its dramatists should be " reverent in the right place."
It was Beaumont and Fletcher's perfect agreement with
their age that explains their popularity. I t was the public
which gave them the mould within which they readily worked
and shaped their genius. Their capacity in supplying an
insatiable public with new plots is remarkable. The sources of
their plots were Italian novels, Spanish novels and plays; the
acquaintance of which they made through translations, probably
getting to know the Spanish drama only through the novels
from which its plots were drawn. The resemblance that has
been observed between Beaumont and Fletcher and Lope de
Yega, came thus from no personal literary intercourse: the resemblance is sufficiently explained by noticing the similarity
of the national life of both Spain and England at that time,
and the similar position of Lope de Yega and Beaumont and
Fletcher, all being artists, whose sole aim, beyond the desire to
write, was to please the public taste.
The plots of many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are
quite outside the pale, as far as modern standards are concerned,
but their power of effectively telling a story, of dramatising an
episode in order to give adequate effect to the most important
incidents, cannot be over praised. Mr. Craik says: " I n the
conduct of a story for the mere purposes of the stage,—-for
keeping the attention of an audience awake, and their expectation suspended throughout the whole course of the action,—they
excel Shakspere; who, aiming at higher things, and producing
his more glowing pictures by fewer strokes, is careless about the
mere excitement of curiosity, whereas they are tempted to linger
as long as" possible over every scene, both for that end, and
because their proper method of evolving character and passion
is by such delay and repetition of touch upon touch."
Within a limited range their power of characterisation is
good, but it is of the same crude sort as Ben Jonson's,—the study
of types of human nature, all more or less exaggerated in certain
directions. These types occur again and again in Beaumont
and Fletcher's plays,—the blunt old soldier, the patient devoted
woman, etc. Indeed, characterisation of the higher sort was as
impossible to Beaumont and Fletcher as it was to Jonson.
Their genius was devoid of those liner perceptions and higher

CHAP, XL]

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

283

sensibilities which alone can give real deep insight into human
nature, and make possible the conception and treatment of the
higher and finer sorts of character. Ben Jonson failed in
characterisation because his colossal egoism was an insurmountable obstacle to a sympathetic comprehension of his fellow
beings: in theory he understood and sympathised with the
best and noblest aspects of human nature. Beaumont and
Fletcher had a thorough and spontaneous sense of human fellowship, but it was fellowship with only the lower aspects of
human nature: even in theory they were incapable of sympathy and understanding with the nobler aims and qualities of
humanity. "Undoubtedly," as Mr. Craik says, "taking them
all in all, they have left us the richest and most magnificent
drama we possess after that of Shakspere; the most instinct
and alive both with the true dramatic spirit and with that of
general poetic beauty and power, the most brilliantly lighted
up with wit and humour:" and yet we cannot help feeling that
their art, perfect as it is in its way, throws no new light on the
world, makes no suggestions, opens out no new vistas, such as
the greatest genius, by virtue of its wide comprehension and
deep insight, unconsciously does. The work of Beaumont and
Fletcher is essentially the successful work of the second-rate
artist; that their fame in their own day was so great, overpowering that of Shakspere, was because they were the children
of this world; and the children of this world are naturally
always more popular and successful in their generation than
the children of light.

CHAPTER XII.
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

CHAPMAN, George, b. 1557 or 1559, d. 1634 ; HEYWOOD, Tbomas, 15701650 ; MIDDLETON, Thomas, b. 1570, d. 1627 ; MARSTON, John, b.
1585,

d. 163-;

John, b.

DEKKER, Thomas, b. 1570, d.

1640;

WEBSTER,

, d. 1650 ; MASSINGER, Philip, b. 1584, d. 1639 ; FORD,

John, b. 1586, d. 1640; TOURNEUR, Cyril; SHIRLEY, James, 1596-1666.

I F we take tbe best work of Sbakspere as marking tbe culminating point of Elizabethan dramatic art, tbe decline of tbe drama
may be said to include tbe work of both Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. Witbout doubt, tbe work of tbese artists
shows tbe bad effects necessarily produced on dramatic art by tbe
degeneration of tbe national life. Great and unmistakable influence on tbe personalities and works of tbese authors was exercised
by tbe narrowness of tbe interests of the great collective life, by
the growing division of tbe nation into two sections—tbe ascetic,
thoughtful, moral, and puritan section, who despised art as the
silly play of life, and called theatres the " devil's chapels;" and
the unthinking, pleasure-loving, artistic cavalier section, eager
for life and art, but whose energy was controlled by no serious
interests, by no consciousness of great responsibilities, political or
religious. In Ben Jonson we see tbe reactionist, a great highminded spirit, of high standards, shocked with the immorality of
his time, longing to be its teacber; showing the bad effects of bis
divorce from his age in the pompous-pedantic tone, the consciousness witb which he enunciates sentiments, whose morality he
knows will strike unpleasantly a popular audience ; in the brutal
coarseness of some of bis plays, when contemporary manners are
represented at tbeir worst in order to point a moral. And in
Beaumont and Fletcher tbe fatal division between national life
and tbe life of art is still further shown. They have lost all
standard of morality; everything is measured by tbe standard of

CHAP. XII. ]

DECLINE OP THE DRAMA,

285

the picturesque; the life with which they deal is but the limited
one of the court and of the fashionable world; the study of
character is but the study of manners and of exaggerated types;
everywhere is visible that want of self-control which comes when
life has no serious aims or interests to serve as its discipline.
Beaumont and Fletcher have the vigorous, eager Elizabethan
individuality; but it is demoralised by the absence of those
checks which, in the early part of the Renaissance, had kept its
vitality within bounds; with them passion is often mere vehemence, enthusiasm; and the desire for liberty mere wantonness.
But Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher stand out from
among the artists of their time, because they possess each a little
share of that great genius which can give vigour and life to
whatever it touches.
Under the school, therefore, of " Decline of the Drama " we
must include all those lesser spirits who exhibit strikingly all the
characteristics of a declining art—of an art that has no firm root
in national life, and yet that shows no tendency to seek for itself
an artificial life on its own conditions,—to become a literary drama
pure and simple, like that of the German Romanticists under
Tieck. Such a drama is represented by men such as Chapman,
Ford, and Webster—men of sufficient ability to claim a high rank
among dramatists; and by the very able but decidedly secondrate work of Heywood, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Marston,
and Shirley. Some of these men wrote for the City, some for
the Court; but as the City imitated almost entirely the ways and
manners of the Court, there is no difference in the spirit of the
plays produced for these different audiences, although their subjects were sometimes different. Both the Court and that part of
the City which favoured art and followed Court standards, were,
very early in the reign of James I., separated by a hard and fast
line from the puritanic body of the nation. Although the seeds
of the Puritan movement lay deep down in the feeling of the
nation, James I., by his theory of divine right, by his proposition
of " n o bishop, no king," was the first to make the division of
the people into two distinct parties, obvious and serious. There
might still be some men, artistic in temperament and of deep
moral sensibilities, who, like Milton, could unite in their youth
the artistic enjoying life of the Cavalier with the thoughtful
scholarly life of the Puritan; but sooner or later, so wide was
the breach made by James I., every practical man interested
in the life of action must make a decided choice, must throw in
his lot either with one or the other party. To a wide nature

286

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. XII.

the choice would be exceedingly difficult. The King and the
Cavalier party, who represented the wider existence of art and
thought, lived a private life, which was devoid of all high sentiment and morality; in public life equally devoid of high principles and patriotism. James was ungrateful and insolent; his
Court was filled with needy and unattractive Scotch favourites;
he was weak and imperious in his behaviour to his Parliament,
shamefully unpatriotic in his foreign policy. He had allowed
the execution of Raleigh, the hero of England's most glorious
period, in order to please Spain; he wished, in defiance of all
the instincts of the nation, to cement this friendship by a marriage ; he had ruined English dignity on the Continent by the
part he took, or rather did not take, in the Thirty Years' War.
Unfortunately for the acceptance of his grand theories of the
right divine by which he ruled, James was not fitted by personal
attractions to inspire an enthusiasm such as that which had
glorified Elizabeth and inspired her poets. God's delegate, as he
called himself—God's silly vassal, as the Presbyterians called
him—"was exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering,
shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and talking
in the style alternately of a buffoon and a pedagogue." On the
other hand, what could be more repulsive and narrow than the
Puritan morality; what could be more intolerant and unreasonable than the view they took of life and a r t : their morality could
make as complete a wreck of life as the Cavalier immorality.
The vindictiveness of both sides to each other had been signalised,
early in the reign of Elizabeth, by a war of pamphlets—the
Puritans indulging in heavy Scriptural curses against their opponents ; their opponents displaying to the fullest extent their
genius for insults. Only in Sir Philip Sidney's Apologie for
Poetrie do we find any attempt at the reconciliation of the truth
of both sides. Nash, the dramatist, was especially fertile in the
invention of insults; and we find even the courtly Lyly taking
leave of an adversary with, "Farewell, and be hanged." The
stage was " a beam, an exceeding great beam," in the eyes of the
Puritans. They had no desire to reform i t : it must be annihilated. Between 1616 and 1625 appeared a mass of Puritan
literature directed aginst it. In 1616 was published The Rich
Cabinet, Furnished with Varietie of Descriptions, undertaking to
prove that player is now a name of contempt; and in 1632 appeared a great work, which had taken seven years to write, The
Histrio-Mastix, by Pryniie. This unfortunate man incurred severe
punishment, not only because he had written against an institu-

CHAP, XII.]

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

287

tion protected by royal authority, but also because he had spoken
the utmost evil against women actors.1 Actresses had come over
from France and taken the place of boys in 1629, and the Queen
and her ladies had themselves acted in a pastoral. Prynne was
thus found to be verging on high treason; his book was condemned to be burnt, he himself was expelled from the Bar and
the Inn, and was compelled to pay a fine of £5000 to the King,
and exposed to public disgrace in the pillory. Prynne had only
seen four several plays, so he tells us, but the contemplation of
these four plays had apparently but strengthened his prejudices.
" Stage-plays have their origin from the devil: were invented
and practised by his instruments (Pagans), and are therefore
necessarily sinful and unlawful unto Christians. . . . They are
among the pomps and vanities of this wicked world which Christians renounce in baptism ; they are often impious, sacrilegious,
and blasphemous; if not, are idle, frothy, superfluous, and unprofitable." Ten years after the publication of this work the
theatres were closed and Prynne was revenged; for the grave,
serious, Puritan spirit, the enemy to all that was unthinking and
buoyant and spontaneous in life, spread its tyranny over the
nation and crushed out all art. Under the first two Stuarts art
did indeed tend to become " frothy and unprofitable," and our
serious and more intolerant ancestors showed no more ability in
separating the use of a thing from its abuse than we do now.
And without doubt these kings, disliked by the nation with
whose deepest instincts they were at variance, did much to discredit the theatre by their patronage. They fostered artificially
an institution which might have profited by a normal decline,
and might have revived again when naturally called for by the
needs and circumstances of national life. I t is to the Stuarts'
dramatic patronage, to the consequent unhealthy life of the
drama, that we owe the violence of the great burst of Puritan
rage against it, which overwhelmed it entirely for a time, but
only served to eventually stimulate it to a still more reactionary
and degenerate life after the Eestoration. James I. had been a
friend to the drama in Scotland, when to favour it was to assert
the royal independence. I n England he took the actors under
special royal protection. The Lord Chamberlain's company, of
which Richard Burbadge and Shakspere had been members, became known in 1603 as that of the King's servants. The Earl of
1
Taswell and Langmead say the Queen and her ladies acted after the book
had been published, which makes the royal indignation against Prynne appear
still more unjust.

288

DECLINE OE THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. XII.

Worcester's players became the Queen's Players; and the children
of the Chapel, in 1603 became known as the children of His
Majesty's Revels ; but his own example, the example of his Court,
his unattractive favourites, had on it an influence the reverse of
inspiring; no Court was worse than that of James L, and its
influence then was very wide and very powerful. London has
never quite been to England what Paris has been to France ; but
under Elizabeth and James there certainly was a danger of the
too great predominance of the capital; the Court, both in religion
and politics, influenced the country to a dangerous extent. Its
tone in religion was either that of servile faith and unthinking
superstition or utter indifference. " To be of no religion," says
a character in Fletcher's The Elder Brother,
" Argues a subtle moral understanding,
And it is often cherished."

James I., although he gratified Puritan feeling by passing a
statute against the profane use of sacred names on the stage,
made no secret of the fact that the strength of his religious convictions was quite as much due to political reasoning as to the
enthusiasm of a spiritual faith. Thus, if we perhaps except
Massinger, who gives evidence of a sincere piety, which in its
mysticism stamps him as a Roman Catholic, the dramatists who
wrote for the fashionable world were careful to exclude a religious
element. Political allusions were frequent, though, with the
exception of Middleton's Game of Chess, which deals in a
thoroughly national spirit with the affair of the Spanish match,
few of them showed any deep or genuine interest in the national
politics of the time. I t was indeed natural that this should be
the case, for the national instincts were so opposed to the royal
policy that the publication of any play reflecting them would
have been dangerous to the author. It was probably to please
his city patrons, who in a great national question of this kind
would be sure to lean to the traditional national policy, that
Middleton ventured to treat the subject of the Spanish marriage
in a manner so obnoxious to the king. It is an indication of the
strength of public opinion on this point that its author had the
courage to produce it, and that it was allowed to pass the censorship of the Master of the Revels, before the king, who had ordered
that no modern Christian king should be represented on the
stage, commanded it to be suppressed. But the playwright for
the most part avoided all political allusions, save those which
were quite innocent of partisan motive, or those which fell in

CHAP, X I L ]

DECLIKE OF THE DRAMA.

289

with the king's political theories concerning his divine right.
Almost all the dramatists of this age, Chapman excepted, are
what Coleridge calls "high-flying passive obedience Tories."
The sentiment of Lord Huntly in Ford's Perhin Warbech is no
exaggeration of the kind of tone James exacted from his
followers—
" But kings are earthly gods, there is no meddling
With their anointed bodies : for their actions
They, only, are accountable to heaven."

Allusions " to the divinity of royal birth " won the favour of
a Stuart, who promptly suppressed unfavourable allusion even
to one on whom the royal favour had fallen; as in the case of
Eastward Ho, when Jonson, although not guilty of the offending
lines, generously joined Dekker and Marston in prison. But
that political interest was merely suppressed, not dead, among the
dramatists of the decline, is evidenced by the comparatively good
historical plays that we have in this period. Bussy d'Ambois,
and The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, by Chapman, and Perhin
Warbech by Ford. All three rank high in the literature of the
historical drama. They belong to a school quite different from
that to which the historical plays of Shakspere belong. Shakspere
takes us back to the past, but he interests us not in the spirit
and movements of that past, but in its characters. The interest
in Julius Ccesar is not in the party crisis, not in the political
importance of the conspiracy against Caesar—in Coriolanus it is
not in the importance of the democratic agrarian revolt against the
aristocracy of Borne—nor in Richard II. is it in the constitutional revolution which placed Henry IV. on the throne—nor in
Henry V. in the victorious achievements of England over France
—but in the inward mental struggles of the heroes of these movements, in the psychological battles of their natures with their will.
But the plays of Chapman and of Ford belong to that different
school, which excites interest by entering into the spirit of the
age. As Mr. Ward says, speaking of Chapman's works, " Their
author shows himself fully aware of the true significance of the
realities which cast their lurid glare across his mimic scene. A
strong historical sense, if I may use the expression, is so rare
even in the greatest of our Elizabethan dramatists, that it is all
the more noteworthy to find Chapman thoughtfully sounding
the depths of the movements, from the consequences of which his
age was still trembling. There are passages in these plays which
go to the very bottom of the dark waters from which France had
TJ

290

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. XII.

recently emerged, and which might have taught the age of James
I. lessons sorely needed by it." So with Ford in Perkin Warbeck.
It is strictly true to the facts of history as given in Bacon's Life
of Henry VII. With the utmost skill he treats the character of
Warbeck: no doubt is thrown on the assumption that he was
an impostor, yet care is taken that he should never betray
himself; the spirit of the episode is preserved, though the personal dignity and attractions of the impostor allow him to be the
hero of the play. The dramatists of this period, although they
fail in sustained vigour, in artistic self-control, in that deeper
insight which alone can give the power of characterisation, yet
they are often very successful as poets. Isolated passages of
poetic beauty, recalling the manner of the best Elizabethans,
occur again and again in their works; but they are the most
unequal of artists, incapable for the most part of long sustained
poetic effort.
CHAPMAN is specially distinguished by his likeness to Ben
Jonson. He had not the great Jonson's gift of humour and
satire, but he was as full, as he, of grave morality and dignified
sententiousness, of speculation as to the deeper problems of life.
Long philosophic speculations interrupt the action of the play.
In the tragedy of Ccesar and Pompey, Cato discourses on an
after-life:—
" W e shall, past death
Retain those forms of knowledge, learn'd in life :
Since if what here we learn we there shall lose,
Our immortality were not life but time :
And that our souls in reason are immortal
Their natural and proper objects prove ;
"Which immortality and knowledge are :
For to that object ever is referr'd
The nature of the soul, on which the acts
Of her high faculties are still employed :
And that true object must her powers obtain
To which they are in nature's aim directed ;
Since 'twere absurd to have her set an object
Which possibly she never can aspire."

The fact that literature tends to become pedantic and obscure
when the creative genius of an age is gone, finds continually
abundant proof in Chapman's works. He has a misplaced desire
to show his learning, to argue on unprovable subjects; of which
this passage, in which he endeavours to show that the soul is
immortal because she must be of the same nature as the object
she pursues, is only one among many examples. Equally notice-

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291

able in Chapman's works is another characteristic, which he certainly did not share with his age, and which again connects him
with the high-minded Jonson. Chapman has " a courageous,
ardent spirit, utterly at odds with life, but still true to its owTn
nobility, still capable in happier moments of divining life's real
significance and of asserting lofty truths in pregnant words—
(

Free suffering for the truth makes sorrow sing
And mourning far more sweet than banquetting:
Let all men judge, and who is, can deny
That the rich crown of old Humanity
Is still your birthright ? and was ne'er let down
From Heaven for rule of beast's lives : but your own.' "

" He was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and
temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet," says Wood; and
Jonson, whose standard of what men ought to be was so high,
is said to have " loved" Chapman. Webster placed Chapman
at the head of contemporary dramatists; but although Chapman's principal plays, Bussy d'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy
d'Ambois, and Birorfs Conspiracy, are worthy of a high place
among Elizabethan historical plays, and although some of his
comic characters are cleverly drawn, yet he is not by any means
deserving of such praise, for his powers of characterisation are
of no high order. As Charles Lamb says, " He could not go out
of himself to inform and animate other existences." We can see
very well what he means a character to be : he had all his great
contemporary's purpose, but little of his genius in carrying out
that purpose. Indeed, the great popularity of his historical
plays was partly due to the recency of the events with which they
dealt: spectators would surround Chapman's creations with the
interest they naturally felt in the personages who had lived and
acted so near their own times. The scene of Bussy d'Ambois is
laid at the court of Henry I I I . of France. Henry III. came to
the throne in 1574, and led a disgraceful career, entirely under
the dictation of his mother and her minions. Chapman dares
not to treat him quite with that severity which he deserves; " but
the character of Monsieur, his equally contemptible brother, he
handles with unsparing fidelity to fact." Bussy d'Ambois is a
" robust child of nature," standing out in relief against the background of a corrupt court, to which he has been introduced by
Monsieur. He raises himself without help to an independent
position, seeking for favour neither with him nor the Duke of
Guise, the leader of that Holy League, begun in 1576, to extirpate

292

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. XII.

heresy. Both conspire to ruin him, and his death is effected by
means of the jealousy of the Count of Montsury, with whose
wife Bussy is in love. I t is what we are told about d'Ambois,
what is said of him, more than the actual handling of his character, which makes us realise what Chapman wished him to be.
The scene in which a messenger, in the presence of King Henry
III. of France and his court, tells the manner of a combat to
which he was witness, of three to > three, in which d'Ambois
remained sole survivor, is characteristic of the descriptive manner
in which Chapman interests one in his characters :—•
" I saw fierce d'Ambois and his two brave friends
Enter the field, and at their heels their foes,
Which were the famous soldiers Barrisor,
L'Anou, and Pyrrhot, great in deeds of arms :
All which arriv'd at the even'st piece of earth
The field afforded, the three challengers
Turn'd head, drew all their rapiers and stood rank'd,
When face to face the three defendants met them
Alike prepared and resolute alike.
Like bonfires of contributory wood
Every man's look show'd, fed with other's spirit;
As one had been a mirror to another,
Like forms of life and death each took from other :
And so were life and death mix'd at their heights
That you could see no fear of death (for life)
Nor love of life (for death); but in their brows
Pyrrho's opinion in great letters shone :
' That life and death in all respects are one.'
So Barrisor (advised),
Advanced his naked rapier 'twixt both sides,
Ripp'd up the quarrel, and compared six lives,
Then laid in balance with six idle words,
Offer'd remission and contrition too :
Or else that he and d'Ambois might conclude
The others' danger. D'Ambois liked the last:
But Barrisor's friends (being equally engaged
In the main quarrel) never would expose
His life alone to that they all deserved ;
And (for the other offer of remission)
D'Ambois (that like a laurel put on fire
Sparkled and spit) did much more than scorn
That his wrong should incense him so like chaff
To go so soon out, and like lighted paper
Approve his spirit at once both fire and ashes."
One can hardly believe, says Charles Lamb, but that some of
these lines were written after Milton had described his warring
angels; those, for instance, describing the clash of the combat—

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293

" And then like flame and powder they commix'd,
So sprightly that I wish they had been spirits,
That the ne'er shutting wounds they needs must open.
Might as they open'd shut, and never kill."

In this scene he gives evidence of that taste and genius for the
description of combat which led him to be the translator of
Homer's Iliad; he shows that delight in the stirring scenes of
warfare, which wanted only simplicity and directness of narration
to make him an admirable interpreter of the Homeric spirit.
In the preface to the Revenge of Bussy oVAmboisy Chapman,
in Jonsonian manner, states his idea of what a tragedy should
be. " Material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to
virtue and deflexion from her contrary, are," he says, " the soul,
limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy." The hero of this
tragedy is Clermont, not a child of nature like Bussy, but a man
given to lengthy moral reflections, for which he always finds
abundant opportunity, in spite of the absorbing object of his life,
which is the speedy revenge of the death of his brother Bussy.
'' No particular torture
Can force me from my glad obedience
To anything the high and general Cause
To match with his whole fabric hath ordained.
And know ye all (though far from all your aims,
Yet worth them all, and all men's endless studies)
That in this one thing all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contained :
A man to join himself with the universe
For his main sway, and make, in all things fit,
One with that all, and go on, round as i t ;
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part
And into straits or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete universe might be
Subject to such a ray of it as he ;
But to consider great necessity
All things as well refract as voluntary
Reduceth to the prime celestial cause ;
"Which he that yields to with a man's applause ;
And cheek by cheek goes, crossing it no breath,
But like God's image follows to the death,
That man is truly wise ; and everything,
Each cause and every part, distinguishing
In nature, with enough art understands,
And that full glory merits at all hands,
That doth the whole world at all parts adorn
And appertains to one celestial born."

The stage direction immediately following—exeunt omnes—
seems to convey the effect which a speech so truly weighty

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[CHAP. XII.

in moral purposes, yet so long, so ponderous, so disconnected with
all the action of the play, must produce on spectator and reader.
Chapman is not happier in the characterisation of Biron's Conspiracy, and in the intimately connected sequel, the tragedy of
the Marshal of France. These plays, dealing with events so
recent, were prohibited by the desire of the French ambassador,
—Henry IY. reigning when it was produced,—as well as by
the statute of James I., forbidding the dramatic representation of
modern kings. But in spite of the opportunities he had for
the study and knowledge of the character of Biron, Chapman
cannot make the figure of his hero interesting.
"The note
of Biron's character," says Mr. "Ward, "is that of overbearing
arrogance." We have evidence in this play of Chapman's
freedom from the slavish loyalty of his day,—his contempt
for those kings "who strained past right for their r i g h t ; "
his conception of their great duties. He puts the following
lines into the mouth of Henry IY., deliberating on the death
of a traitor—
" For in one subject, death's unjust affrights,
Passions and pains, though he be ne'er so poor,
Ask more remorse than the voluptuous spleens
Of all kings in the world deserve respect:
He should be born gray headed, that will bear
The weight of empire."

But in this, as in all of Chapman's plays, the chief merit lies in
individual passages, in specimens of that "full and heightened
style," which attracted so the admiration of Webster. Some of
the best lines of Chapman are in the passages in which he
indulges his love for simile: sometimes, indeed, we find his
great taste for metaphor degenerating into a love of conceits:
he is frequently on that dangerous borderland when overwrought thoughts tend to become merely obscure: we see in
him the spirit of that age which produced the fantastic and
metaphysical school: his wit is at times too much
" Of the true Pierian spring
That can make anything of anything ;"
and his similes are sometimes so obscure and sometimes so
strained that they fatigue the attention and injure the quality
of his verse. In a passage in Biron's Conspiracy, he compares
the eclipse of men's glories when they turn traitors to the stormy
eclipse of the moon by a cloud—

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295

•' As when the moon hath comforted the night,
And set the whole world in silver of her light,
The planets, asterisms, and whole state of heaven
In beams of gold descending : all the winds
Bound up in caves, charged not to drive abroad
Their cloudy heads ; a universal peace
(Proclaim'd in silence) of the quiet earth :
Soon as her hot and dry fumes are let loose,
Storms and clouds mixing suddenly put out
The eyes of all those glories : the creation
Turn'd into chaos : and we then desire
Eor all our joy of life the death of sleep,
So when the glories of our lives (men's loves,
Clear consciences, our fames and loyalties),
That did us worthy comfort, are eclipsed,
Grief and disgrace invade us : and for all
Our night of life besides, our misery craves,
Dark earth would ope and hide us in our graves."

A passage in Bussy d'Amhois, less perfect, perhaps, if the
analogy be examined closely, is poetic, with a touch of feeling
which Chapman, grave and self-controlled and studied as he
is in style, did not often allow himself—
" The errant wilderness of a woman's face ;
Where men cannot get out, for all the comets
That have been lighted at it : though they know
That adders lie a-sunning in their smiles."
Characteristic of his best style, and of that style peculiar to himself, are his lines on the master-spirit in Birorfs Tragedy;—
" Give me the spirit that on life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sailyards tremble, his mast cracks,
And his rapt ship runs on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air :
There is no danger to a man that knows
"What life and death is ; there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law :
He goes before them and commands them all
That to himself is a law rational."
Next to Chapman must be noticed THOMAS HEYWOOD, for
Charles Lamb has given great prominence to Heywood by calling him " a prose Shakspere." But to compare him in any way
with his great fellow dramatist is to excite expectations which
must be doomed to disappointment. Heywood writes exceedingly able verse, at times picturesque and striking: he constructs

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[CHAP. XII.

plots which are interesting and well carried out; he sustains
well a simple uncomplex character, and, above all, he is innocent
of that moral coarseness which disfigured so many of the
works of his contemporaries. He is a finished playwright:
his work contains no hints of great and undeveloped powers,
no flashes of a great, feeling, and thinking genius, which one
would naturally expect in one who possessed the faintest claim
to compare with Shakspere, and which we see far more in the
works of his wild and erring contemporaries Webster and Ford.
In two hundred and twenty plays had Heywood " an entire or at
least a main figure." Only twenty-five have come down to us—
"The rest have perished, exposed to the casualties of a theatre;"
but the plays that we have of his do not bear any marks of haste
or careless workmanship. Heywood was distinctly a finished artist
of the second-rate order, exceedingly fertile and exceedingly versatile. In The Brazen Age, The Golden Age, and The Silver Age,
he successfully and pleasantly dramatises classical tales. Ceres,
seeking her daughter, questions Triton—
" Thou that on thy shelly trumpet
Summons the sea-god, answer from the depth.
Triton. On Neptune's sea-horse with my concave trump
Through all the abyss I have shrill'd thy daughter's loss.
The channels clothed in waters, the low cities
In which the water-gods and sea-gods dwell,
I have perused ; sought through whole woods and forests
Of leafless coral planted in the deeps ;
Toss'd up beds of pearl; roused up huge waves
And stern sea monsters from their rocky dens ;
Those bottoms, bottomless ; shallows and shelves,
And all those currents where the earth's springs break in,
Those plains where Neptune feeds his porpoises,
Sea-morses, seals, and all his cattle else :
Through all our ebbs and~tides my trump hath blazed her,
Yet can no cavern show me Proserpine."

Then Ceres questions the Earth—
" Fair sister Earth, for all these beauteous fields
Spread o'er thy breast; for all these fertile crops
"With which my plenty hath enrich'd thy bosom ;
For all those rich and pleasant wreaths of grain
With which so oft thy temples I have crown'd ;
For all the yearly liveries and fresh robes
Upon thy summer's beauty I bestow :
Show me my child.
Earth. Not in revenge, fair Ceres,
That your remorseless inough have raked my breast,
Nor that your iron4ooth'd harrows print my face

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297

So full of wrinkles ; that you dig my sides
For marl and soil, or make me bleed my springs
Through all my open'd veins to weaken me—
Do I conceal your daughter ? I have spread
My arms from sea to sea, look'd o'er my mountains,
Examined all my pastures, groves, and plains,
Marshes and wolds, my woods and champain fields,
My dens and caves,—and yet, from foot to head
I have no place on which the moon doth tread."

He can tell a highly-wrought picturesque story in appropriate
verse—
{
' I remember
There lived a Spanish princess of our name,
An Isabella too, and not long since,
Who from her palace window steadfastly
Gazing upon the sun, her hair took fire.
Some augurs held it as a prodigy :
I rather think she was Latona's brood,
And that Apollo courted her bright hair ;
Else envying that her tresses put down his,
He scorch'd them off in envy."

The standard of Heywood's morality is undoubtedly higher
than that of his generation, but at times it is excessively strained,
as in the overdrawn scene in The Challenge for Beautyr, between
Petrocella, the fair Spanish lady, and Montferrers. Montferrers,
an English captain, who himself is in love with Petrocella, and
beloved by her, though this is unknown to him, is the messenger
to her of another's love—of Valladaura's, of whom he is the captive
by war. In this scene Montferrers, encouraged by Petrocella, declares unwillingly his love for her, and, pretending that he wishes
to test the strength of her affection for him, makes her swear to
an unknown condition—
" Love noble Yalladaura,
And at his soonest appointment, marry him.
Pet. Then I am lost."

In spite of what Charles Lamb says concerning the simplicity and nature of Heywood's drama, it cannot be denied that
some of his scenes and episodes are full of that forced and
exaggerated feeling which is best described as sentimentality.
In The Woman hilled with Kindness, which has the credit of
being one of the first artistic rendering of the incidents of
domestic life, pathos of a rather weakly moral and sentimental
kind is accumulated, till the reader almost longs for the wild
and fiercely unconventional outbursts of a Webster or a Ford.

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[CHAP. XII.

Mr. Frankford, in order to punish his faithless wife, determines
to kill her with kindness.
" I'll not martyr thee,
. . . but with usage
Of more humility torment thy soul,
And kill thee even with kindness."

This questionable forbearance, which was regarded by the
conventions of the day as the highest magnanimity, has the
desired effect, and Mrs. Frankford dies penitent, amid the mingled
tears and blessings and pardons of her husband and friends,
admiring the " grace and humanity " of her husband.
The dramatist MIDDLETON has had great prominence given to
him, first in bis lifetime, by his courage in dealing in the Game
of Chess with such a forbidden political subject as the Spanish
marriage; and secondly, posterity has given him undue importance by a long and rather unnecessary controversy concerning the priority of his or Shakspere's witches. Certainly it is by
his Witch that Middleton deserves to be remembered. His witches
are not the half-real, half-subjective creations of Shakspere, in
which he seems to have mingled the popular conceptions of
witches with his own idea of the soul's inward drama—of its
spiritual promptings, which sometimes are so vivid that they
appear to the mind as forms of the external world; they are
simply the very vigorous and picturesque renderings of that class
of malign creatures who were a definite part of the popular
creed. Any eccentricity in those times branded a person as a
witch : and it needed only a little imagination to picture them,
in virtue of the evil power which, made them different to other
men, defying the laws of gravitation, and riding on broomsticks
on midnight journeys through the air. Middleton's Hecate
says—
"0 what a dainty pleasure 'tis
To ride in the air
"When the morn shines fair,
And sing and dance and toy and kiss,
Over woods, high rocks and mountains,
Over seas (our mistress' fountains),
Over steep towers and turrets,
We fly by night 'mongst troops of spirits.
No ring of bells to our ears sounds,
3 T howl of wolves, no yelps of hounds ;
So
No, not the noise of water's breach,
Or cannon's throat, our height can reach."

They are the bad powers to which wicked people resort when

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299

they wish to commit crimes : they do not, like Shakspere's
witches, originate bad impulses. They are distinctly different in
conception from Shakspere's witches; thus the controversy concerning the priority of The Witch or Macbeth can do very little
damage to the originality of either dramatist. But Middleton,
if we except his work in this play, may be classed among the
second-rate dramatists of the decline, who, although they were
superior in morality, and had conceptions of higher and purer
feeling, yet were inferior in power and vigour. The great inequality of some of the later Elizabethans was doubtless due to their
uncontrolled self-abandonment to their feelings ; their grotesqueness and absurdity, and the coarseness which frequently disfigures
their works, were due to their want of self-control, both moral
and artistic; but at the same time they gave what little genius
they had full play, and in their works we find passages of true
poetic beauty,—passages which recall the great Elizabethan
nature at its best, in all its force: we have gleams of genius
which light up the scene with the glow of passion and despair,
or with the pale intense light of pathos. Morality and enjoyment of life were so separated in the national creed that the
dramatist could look nowhere for a standard of morality. There
were two sides to the artist's life: one was Pleasure, the other
Despair—
" Sweet Pleasure,
Delicious Pleasure ! earth's supremest good,
The spring of blood, though it dry up our "blood ;
Rob me of that (though, to be drunk with pleasure,
As rank excess even in best things, is bad,
Turns man into a beast); yet, that being gone,
A horse, and this (the goodliest shape) all one,
We feed, wear rich attires ; and strive to cleave
The stars with marble towers ; fight battles ; spend
Our blood, to buy us names : and in iron hold
"Will we eat our roots to imprison fugitive gold :
But to do thus, what spell can us excite ?
This, the strong magic of our appetite :
The feast which richly, life itself undoes.
Who'd not die thus ?
Why, even those that starve in voluntary wants,
And, to advance the mind, keep the flesh poor,
The world enjoying them ; them, not the world :
Would they do this, but that they are proud to suck
A sweetness from such sourness." 1

A certain John Jones, living in 1635, expresses in a dirge the
darker side of this life, whose only motive power is Pleasure—
1

Dekker.

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[CHAP. XII.

"Die, die, ah die,
We all must die,
'Tis fate's decree;
Then ask not why.
« When we were framed, the Fates consultedly
Did make this law, that all things born should die.
Yet Nature strove,
And did deny
We should be slaves
To Destiny.
At which, they heap'd
Such misery
That Nature's self
Did wish to die :
And thank their goodness, that they would foresee,
To end our cares with such a mild decree."

Life, being but the eager pursuit after pleasure, welcomes sometimes a death, which, because it gives rest, is " a mild decree."
Life is purposeless : those who seek to leave a living name behind
are but vain in their ambition,
"And weave but nets to catch the wind."
If this school had produced philosophers instead of artists
they would have been pessimists of the deepest dye. DEKKER,
who in common with Webster wrote Westward Ho, from which
the address to Pleasure is taken, had none of the brilliant flashes
of genius which Webster displays; but his conceptions of life
were the same. His mind is of a lower order, of a coarser kind,
but superior in that it is capable of more sustained effort.
Dekker is well known as having, in conjunction with Marston,
written the Satiro-mastix, a play exceedingly feeble in itself, but
interesting as marking an epoch in Ben Jonson's literary quarrels.
In theory Dekker had apparently a high idea of the dramatic
art—
" That man give me, whose breast filled by the muses
With rapture, into a second them infuses :
Can give an actor sorrow, rage, joy, passion,
Whilst'he again (by self-same agitation)
Commands the hearers, sometimes drawing out tears,
Then smiles, and tills them both with hopes and fears."

But in his practical dramatic work he appears to forget his
standard. He sought for popularity by inventing startling plots,
which transcend all bounds of probability; he introduces " ghosts,
coal black"—wondrous hats, which in a moment will transport
the wearer whithersoever he wishes. The verse of the play of

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301

Fortunatus, in which this supernatural hat plays a large part,
does credit to Dekker : it is straightforward, simple, and powerful,
weighed down by no thought that could tend to make it obscure.
The goddess Fortune appears to Fortunatus and offers him the
choice of six things—Wisdom, Strength, Health, Beauty, Long
Life, and Riches.
" Fortunatus, 0, whither am I rapt beyond myself,
More violent conflicts fight in every thought
Than his, whose fatal choice Troy's downfall wrought.
Shall I contract myself to Wisdom's lore ?
Then I lose Riches : and a wise man poor
Is like a sacred book that's never read ;
To himself he lives and to all else seems dead.
This age thinks better of a gilded fool
Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.
I will be strong : then I refuse long life,
And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,
There's a lean fellow beats all conquerors :
The greatest strength expires with loss of breath,
; The mightiest in one minute stoop to death.
Then take long life or Health ? should I do so,
I might grow ugly, and that tedious scroll
Of months and years much misery may enroll;
Therefore I'll beg for beauty ; yet I will not,
The fairest cheek hath oftentimes a soul
Leprous as sin itself and far more foul.
The wisdom of this world is idiotism ;
Strength a weak reed ; Health, sickness' enemy ;
And it at length will have the victory.
Beauty is but a painting ; and Long Life
Is a long journey in December gone,
Tedious, and full of tribulation ;
Therefore, dread sacred empress, make me rich.
My choice is store of gold ; the rich are wise ;
He that upon his back rich garments wears
Is wise, though on his head grow Midas' ears.
Gold is the strength, the sinews of the world,The health, the soul, the beauty most divine ;
A mask of gold hides all deformities ;
Gold is heaven's physic, life's restorative ;
O therefore make me rich."
MAESTON, like Dekker, sought for popular favour by dealing with the horrible and the supernatural. This degenerate
age required extraordinary stimulus for its emotions, and Marston strove to gratify it. For strange and unnatural incident,
Antonio and Mellida has few rivals; for general horror and
bloodiness, its sequel, AntonioJs Bevenge, has certainly no equal.
Antonio, son of the Duke of Genoa, loves Mellida daughter of

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[CHAP. XII.

the Duke of "Venice. These dukes are enemies : ultimately the
Duke of Genoa is routed by the Duke of Venice. Antonio, to
gain his love in spite of family feuds, comes to the court of
Venice disguised as an Amazon. Mellida, in the disguise of a
page, elopes with him. Pursuit is made after the Amazon and
the page; they are caught; but the play ends happily with the
apparent forgiveness of the lovers by Piero, The sequel proves
that this is a temporary illusion. Antonio1s Revenge is full of
" sullen tragic scenes." The prologue hints at the awful nature
of the coming play—
" I f any spirit breathes within this bound
Uncapable of weighty passion,
Who would not know what men must be : let such
Hurry amain from our black visaged shows :
We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast
Nail'd to the earth with grief; if any heart
Pierced through with anguish, pant within this ring ;
If there be any blood whose heat is choked
And stifled with true sense of misery ;
If aught of these strains fill this consort up
They arrive most welcome."

The Duke of Venice then enters " unbraced, his arms bare,
smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand, bloody, and a torch in
the other." He is resolved on further bloodshed : wishing to sow
dissension between Mellida and Antonio, he causes a former
lover of hers to be slain, the corpse placed by her, so that her
astonishment and fright being put down to love for this former
suitor, convict her in Antonio's eyes of fickleness. Then having
said " that he sees no reason to be reasonable," he murders what
friends he still possesses, reduces Mellida to a despair, in which
she dies. " O world," she says,
"Thou art too subtle
Eor honest natures to converse withal,
Therefore 111 leave thee."

Then Antonio begins his revenge, stimulated by his father's
ghost. He is quite successful, and clears the stage of the
remaining characters, some of whom, however, only disappear
temporarily, to reappear as ghosts before the curtain falls. Thus
the poor orphan, as he is called, has his revenge. Occasionally
Marston's verse corresponds to the crudeness and grotesqueness
of his plot: the duke says—

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303

" I ' l l conquer Rome,
Pop out the light of bright religion,
Then helter, skelter, all cocksure."

But very often we meet with passages which recall the best
manner of Beaumont and Fletcher :—
" As having clasped a rose
Within my palm, the rose being taken away,
My hand retains a little breath of sweet:
So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away,
Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest."

The answer of Isabella, the wicked countess of another play,
condemned to death for numberless crimes, to the executioner
who bids her bind her eyes, is striking and effective :—
" I have lived too long in darkness, my friend :
And yet mine eyes with their majestic light
Have got new muses in a poet's sprite,
They've been more gazed at than the god of day,
Their brightness never could be nattered :
Yet thou command'st a fixed cloud of lawn
To eclipse eternally these minutes of light.
I am prepared."

And Marston is happy in the choice of those similes, without
which an Elizabethan could never speak of nature's changes—
"Night, like a mask, is entering Heaven's great hall,
With thousand torches ushering in the way."

Marston considered that the essence of the drama, what he calls
the "life of these things," was in action. Therefore we cannot
expect from him any of that higher dramatic art which consists
in giving interest in character.
Undoubtedly the greatest dramatist of this declining school
was WEBSTER. He does give us interest in character, though the
character he deals with is abnormal character in abnormal circumstances. He, too, can tell a story, and so arrange its episodes
that incident and character act and react on one another; but his
conception of the drama is essentially degenerate and unhealthy;
he is always appealing to the most extreme emotions of his
audience. He appeals, indeed, successfully; the horrible with
him never borders on the grotesque. " To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as
it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop and

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[CHAP. X I I .

then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit,—
this only a Webster can do. Writers of an inferior genius may
'upon horror's head horrors accumulate/ but they cannot do
this. They mistake quantity for quality, they 'terrify babes
with painted devils/ but they know not how a soul is capable of
being moved; their terrors want dignity, their affrightments
are without decorum." Webster's characters and their lives are
best described by two lines at the beginning of the Duchess of
Malfy's dirge—
" Their life, a general mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storm of terror."
Very striking and yet intensely horrible is the character of
Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil. She is indeed an abnormal being: in spite of the skill with which Webster treats her
character, she is an artistic and moral blot, as horrible as Marston's Isabella. I t is as inartistic, as Mr. Ward says, to represent
human nature so abnormally horrible and degraded as it would
be were sculpture to deal with physical deformity. Vittoria has
a passionate impulsive nature, leading her into the most awful
crimes, but hidden under a cold and unabashed demeanour. At
last she is brought to trial on the charge of having murdered her
husband with the aid of her lover the Duke of Brachiano. She
is tried in the presence of the Cardinal Monticelso, cousin to
her deceased husband, the ambassadors of France, England, and
Spain—
" Humbly thus,—
Thus low, to the most worthy and respected
Leiger ambassadors, my modesty
And womanhood I tender ; but withal
So entangled in a cursed accusation
That my defence, of force, like Perseus,
Must personate masculine virtue. To the point,
Find me but'guilty, sever head from body,
We'll part good friends. I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.
Eng. Amb. She hath a brave spirit.
MOTI. Well, well, such counterfeit jewels
Make true ones oft suspected.
Tit You are deceived ;
For know that all your strict combined heads
Which strike against this mine of diamonds,
Shall prove but gLassen hammers, they shall break ;
These are but feigned shadows of my evils ;
Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils,
I am past such needless palsy."

•' This White Devil of Italy," says Charles Lamb, " sets

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305

off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an
innocence resembling boldness, that we seem to see that
matchless beauty of her face which inspires such confidence
into her."
" Condemn you me, for that the Duke did love me 1" she
says—
"So may you blame some fair and crystal river,
For that some melancholic distracted man
Hath drown'd himself in it."
Throughout the whole trial, even when sentence is passed on
her, she is careless and bold—
" 0 woman's poor revenge
Which dwells but in the tongue ! I will not weep,
No. I do scorn to call up one poor tear
To fawn on your injustice."
Only when she stands face to face with Death does her confidence
leave her for one moment—
" My soul, like to some ship in a black storm,
Is driven I know not whither."
Webster, Charles Lamb tells us, was parish clerk at St.
Andrew's, Holborn; he thus accounts for his " anxious recurrence to church matters—sacrilege, tombstones, with the frequent
introduction of dirges." He thus gives expression to his professional sympathies. No better illustration of his delight in
dwelling on the details and horrors of death can be found than
in The Duchess of Malfy. The Duchess's crime, an inexpiable
crime in the eyes of her brothers, is, that she has married her
steward. They prepare for her the most ghastly of tortures
to precede death. She is shown the bodies of her husband and
children counterfeited in wax, as dead. She is kept waking
with noises of madmen till she is nearly mad herself. " I'll tell
thee a miracle," she says to her maid Cariola—
" l a m not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow,
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth offlamingsulphur : yet I am not mad,
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tann'd galley slave is with the oar :
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy."
After a dance of sundry sorts of madmen, a coffin, cords, and a
bell are produced.
x

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[CHAP. XII.

" Farewell, Cariola !
I pray thee look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold ; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now what you please,
What death ?
*
.
Tell my brothers
That I perceive death (now I'm well awake)
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman's fault;
I'd not be tedious to you.
Pull and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me.
Yet stay ; heaven's gates are not so highly arch'd
As prince's palaces ; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees."

She is strangled kneeling. One pang of remorse comes to her
murderer. " Cover her face," says her brother Ferdinand, as he
stands before her corpse; " mine eyes dazzle . . . she died
young." " I think not so," answers Bosola—
"Her infelicity
Seem'd to have years too many."
Webster, at his best, says Mr. Ward, appeals effectively to something besides the emotion of terror. " He has a true insight into
human nature. . . . He knows that men and women will lay open
the inmost recesses of their souls in moments of deep and sudden
agitation. . . . He knows that it is on such occasions that unexpected contrasts, a movement of genuine compassion in an
assassin, a movement of the dignity in the most abandoned, will
offer themselves to the surprised spectator : he knows the fury
and the bitterness, the goad and the after-sting of passion, and
the broken vocabulary of grief. All these he knows and is able
to reproduce, not continually or wearisomely, but with that perception of supremely fitting occasions which is one of the highest,
as it is beyond all doubt one of the rarest, powers of the dramatic
genius."
When we read M. Taine on the later Elizabethan dramatists
we are oppressed with the sound, the fury, the horror of the
atmosphere into which he introduces us. According to him the
dramatists were little better than madmen themselves. Inspired
with " diabolical energy," their plays are as " tales told by idiots,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The Elizabethan,
according to M. Taine, is a savage—an interesting savage certainly ; but he is representative of nature when it runs wild in
this " violent and over-fed race." But that self-control, heroism,

CHAP, XII.]

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

307

and spiritual enthusiasm were not unknown even to those Elizabethans is proved by some of the plays of Ford and Massinger.
The Virgin Martyr•, written by MASSINGER in conjunction with
Dekker, shows an attempt to get above the ordinary plot.
Massinger was a man of unusually steady piety for those times
—he had a certain sort of exalted mysticism. Dorothea, who is
exalted with a passionate religious enthusiasm, attracts the love
of the son of her pagan persecutor. She is condemned to death
as a heretic. " Then with her," cries Antonio, " dies
" The abstract of all sweetness that's in woman.
Get me down, friend, that ere the iron hand
Of Death close up mine eyes, they may at once
Take my last leave both of this light and her.
For she, being gone, the glorious sun himself
To me's Cimmerian darkness."

Through him Dorothea's pardon is obtained.
" Since I find such grace,
Grant that the love of this young man for me,
In which he languisheth to death, may be
Changed to the love of heaven."

Without doubt Dorothea was a beautiful fanatic, a mystic
after the type of the Middle Ages, but none the less does the
conception of her character as the motive of the play, show that
the later Elizabethan did aspire to emotions other than those of
a boisterous animal life. The Broken Heart too, by FORD, is an
instance of a conception of heroism, which, although perhaps
exaggerated and overdrawn, is none the less to be ranked among
their ideals. Calantha, princess of Sparta, is beloved by Ithocles,
who begs his sister Penthea to intercede for him and further his
suit: they are betrothed. While Calantha is celebrating the
wedding of two of her courtiers the news comes, first that her
father is dead; soon after a messenger arrives with the news
that Penthea is dead; and last comes the news that Ithocles is
dead,—cruelly murdered. Calantha makes no outward show
of grief; the festival is continued. She orders her coronation to
take place. Entering the temple dressed in white, a crown on
her head, she kneels at the altar: the dead body of Ithocles is
borne on a hearse in rich robes, having a crown on its head; is
placed by the side of the altar, where she kneels with unbroken
calm; rising, she gives directions as to the management of the
kingdom. She turns at last to the dead body of Ithocles-—

308

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. x n .

" Now I turn to thee, thou shadow
Of my contracted lord ; bear witness all
I put my mother's wedding ring upon
His finger ; 'twas my father's last bequest :
Thus I new marry him, whose wife I am.
Death shall not separate us. 0 my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antic gestures
When one news straight came huddling on another,
Of death and death and death ; still I danced forward ;
But it struck home ; and here, and in an instant,
Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries
Can vow a present end to all their sorrows,
Yet live to vow new pleasures, and outlive them.
They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings :
Let me die smiling.
One kiss on these cold lips : my last . . .
Argos now's Sparta's king.
Dies.
Charles L a m b says " F o r d was of t h e first order of poets.
H e sought for sublimity, not b y parcels, in metaphors or visible
images, b u t directly, where she has her full residence in t h e heart
of m a n ; in t h e actions a n d sufferings of t h e greatest minds."
T h e ingenuity of his characterisation in Perhin Warbeck h a s given
h i m a high place among historical dramatists. " O u t of t h e
darkness of a former age I have endeavoured to personate a great
a t t e m p t , " he says in t h e dedicatory letter to t h e Hon. William
Cavendish.
T h e character of Warbeck is admirably drawn,
a t t r a c t i n g t h e s y m p a t h y of t h e audience. H e is inspired with
t h e sense of t h e greatness of his cause, a n d Ford, though h e makes
his audience admire him, is careful t h a t t h e y should regard his
enthusiasm as t h e " f r e n z y of aspiring youth." " T h y feet of
pride have slipt," says K i n g H e n r y , " t o break t h y neck."
" B u t not m y heart," cries W a r b e c k —
"
.
.
.
my heart
Will mount till every drop of blood be frozen
Till death's perpetual winter. If the sun
Of majesty be darkened, let the sun
Of life be hid from me, in an eclipse
Lasting and universal."
The prospect of death does not shake his confidence—
" Death ! pish ! 'tis but a sound : a name of air ;
A minute's storm : or not so much : to tumble
From bed to bed, be massacred alive
By some physician for a month or two

CHAP, X I L ]

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

309

In hope of freedom from a fever's torments
Might stagger manhood ; here the pain is past
Ere sensibly 'tis felt. Be men of spirit;
Spurn coward passion ; so illustrious mention
Shall blaze our names, and style us kings o'er death."

Kathleen, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, whom he had
married in his triumphant days, believes in him, and consoles him
to the end. Dying, he turns to the king—
'' Harry Richmond,
A woman's faith hath robb'd thy fame of triumph."
The Elizabethan drama in its decline must have been a very
remunerative profession, if we are to judge by the number of those
who devoted themselves to it, many of them certainly having no
high calling in that direction. Henry Porter, Thomas Glapthorn,
John Cook, Richard Hathwaye, Wentworth Smith, George Wilkins, William Alexander (Earl of Stirling), Samuel Rowley, William
Rowley, Daniel, Cyril Tourneur, and James Shirley, are among the
best known. They wrote both alone and in partnership with
one another. Their dramas, on the whole, conform to that sensational standard to which CYUIL TOUKNEUR among the lesser
dramatists most nearly attained; the titles of two of the plays
are enough to show their nature, the Atheist's Tragedy, and the
Revenger's Tragedy. He was feeble in the construction of his
plots, which were full of horror, wickedness, and bloodshed,
writing with the utmost facility and smoothness of style. Occasionally there occur passages which show a certain amount of
poetic talent. In the Atheist's Tragedy are the lines describing
the creeping up of the tide round the body of the dead soldier—
" He lay in his armour, as if that had been
His coffin ; and the creeping sea (like one
"Whose milder temper doth lament the death
Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up
The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek ;
Goes back again and forces up the sands
To bury him : and every time it parts
Sheds tears upon him ; till at last (as if
It could no longer endure to see the man
"Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him) with
A kind of unresolved unwilling pace
"Winding her waves one in another (like
A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands
For grief), ebb'd from the body, and descends ;
As if it would sink down into the earth
And hide itself for shame of such a deed."

310

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

[CHAP. XII.

JAMES SHIRLEY has been discredited in the eyes of posterity

by the criticism of Dryden, who denied him originality. He can,
however, lay claim to an extraordinary fertility and facility in
the writing of plays; but, as Charles Lamb says, he "claims a
place among the worthies of this period, not so much for any
transcendent genius in himself as that he was the last of a great
race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set
of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language and
quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest came in with the
Restoration."
When the drama revived again after the Restoration, it was
in the department of comedy that it particularly excelled.
Humour played round everything, and found nothing sacred.
Life was no longer the serious and exciting thing it had been to
the Elizabethan. The great division between the thinking and
the practical, and the enjoying and playing parts of the nation
still continued; the drama had an unhealthy artificial life, controlled with reference to no living standards of art or morality;
the Puritan rule of Cromwell had interrupted the traditions of
a r t ; the dramatists of the Restoration had the carelessness, the
shallowness, and the immorality of artists who live a life devoid
of deep or healthy interests, and in addition they were made reactionary and aggressive in their carelessness of morals, by remembrance of the moral and political tyranny of the Puritans, so
suddenly and completely overthrown in 1660. Later the greater
spirits of the age felt that although they could not be moral, they
might be proper. With Dryden began that reign of propriety in
art which insisted so much on the necessity of self-control and selfcriticism, on the absence of all that might disturb the smoothness
and harmony of the outward form. Art was to have the perfect
calm and repose of a Greek statue. But the dignity which comes
only from truth to nature could never be theirs, for they had
crushed all nature in cultivating this doubtful virtue of propriety;
the luxuriant and vigorous national nature was pruned away and
suppressed; the natural self was subjected to so much control
that, eventually, there came to be no self to control. The
Elizabethan was looked upon as a savage, Shakspere as one of
the most gifted among barbarians. Then Addison and others
worked for dramatic reform; they endeavoured to make tragedy
live again on the stage, to make its passions pleasing and
elegant, to " refine its rage." But materials for a healthy and
effective drama, either comic or tragic, even had genius been
allowed free rein, were wanting. The incidents of national life

CHAP, xii.]

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

311

did not readily lend themselves to dramatic treatment. What
national changes there had been, had been quietly political,
without the accompaniment of stirring circumstance. As yet
the details of domestic life were not considered important enough
to be a sphere for art. Heywood, the first to treat dramatically
the incidents of domestic life, had been followed by no other
dramatist. Instead, the novelists stepped i n ; Eichardson was the
first to inaugurate this form of art by his Pamela.
The novel is to us what the stage was to the Elizabethan.
Modern life finds in it its truest and most artistic rendering. The
circumstances and conditions of present social life, its diffusion
of interests and feelings, its complexity, necessitate an outward
reserve; the most exciting and dramatic part of modern life
goes on below the surface. We have still the same nature that
the English people possessed in the days of Elizabeth: we are
as eager for life and for joy, our loves and our hatreds are as
keen, our disappointments as bitter, our sorrows and our joys are
as intense, but many causes have concurred to change our manner
of expression. The stage still clings to its old ideals, it clings to
the play of action and neglects the subtler play of motive and
character, whose deepest life and struggles sometimes make only
a faint ripple on the surface of things,—whose vibrations are
often but " mere whispers in the rush of hurrying existence." I t
is this comparatively hidden and inward life which makes the
drama of our greatest novel-artists, and till dramatists and actors
come to recognise that their ideals are those of a society which
has passed away, and that they have little connection with the
highest aspects of modern life, the novel will remain as the
most complete form of English art, and will find no rival in the
stage.

CHAPTEE XIII.
ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION.

HOOKER, Richard, born 1553 ; went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
about 1567 ; obtained a Fellowship there in 1577 ; entered the Church
in 1581 ? accepted the living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, 1584 ; made Master of the Temple, 1585 ; controversy with
Travers, 1585-6 ; begins Ecclesiastical Polity, 1585-6 ; retires to living
of Boscombe, "Wiltshire, 1591; goes to Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, 1595 ; died 1600.
Ecclesiastical Polity entered at Stationers' Hall, March 1592-3. Books I.IV. published 1594 ? Book Y. published 1597.

HOOKER'S work is not only important in the history of the
English Church and as marking an epoch in the Puritan controversy ; it is important in the highest degree in the history of
English thought. Hooker did in the sphere of moral and social
knowledge what Bacon did in the sphere of natural science.
Bacon gave to the students and observers of nature the idea of
law,—of law which was not the creation of the intellectual imagination, but whose actual existence was to be discovered by
the careful and patient examination of phenomena.
Bacon was the first in the modern world to establish scientifically the idea that there was an invariable sequence in the
phenomena of nature; that there was order in the world of nature.
Hooker's work first suggested that there was order in the moral
world; that man has neither absolute power over his life nor is
the servant of an omnipotent and capricious will; but is always
unconsciously governed by law. '' He laid down," says Mr. Church,
" the theory of a rule derived not from one alone, but from all
sources of light and truth with which man finds himself encompassed." In his work lay the germs of what has since developed
into moral and political science. He was the first to suggest the
idea that law was powerful in the moral world, an idea which,
as Mr. Church says, has become the inheritance of the English

CHAP. XIII.]

HOOKER.

313

race. The religious controversy of the time gave to Hooker the
occasion of his work. He wished to defend the Church of
England against the attacks of the Puritans; and by the broad
basis he took for his arguments, he made an epoch in the history
of the Church of England as great as that which, by the earnestness, simplicity, and enthusiasm of his style, he made in the
history of English prose. But Hooker was no conscious innovator
either in matter or style. His purpose, he imagined, was purely
conservative; he wished to clear the Church of England from
the aspersions which had been cast on it by the Puritans; he
wished to show that its first principles were grounded not on
convention, not on unmeaning compromise, " but on a conscious
intelligent adaptation to the needs of human beings," who, in
their nature complex, must necessarily be obedient to many kinds
of different laws. In the course of his work he endeavoured to
show that law was powerful, not only in God's dealings with
nature—with unconscious agents, but as active also in his dealings with men in the moral sphere. And in the thought which
he brought to establish his reasons, in his eagerness to prove his
point, in his enthusiasm for his subject, he gave an intellectuality,
an earnestness, and a fervent eloquence to his writing, which
first revealed what English prose might be.
"This age," says Hooker, speaking of his own, "is full of tongue
and weak of brain." Full of tongue it indeed was, but the controversies to which the settlement of the Eeformation gave rise
were by no means always conducted with intellectual feebleness.
As Hallam says, after the first heat of the Eeformation was over,
there was a retrocession on the reformed side. The controversy
between Catholics and Protestants, instead of being an appeal to
authority on one side and an appeal to reason on the other, was
conducted with reference to authority on both sides; and as the
strength of the Protestant side rests on reason, and receives
inadequate support from the " Fathers," Eoman Catholicism had
frequently the advantage, and many went over to Eome.
Andrewes, a bishop of Elizabeth's time, learned in patristic
philosophy, carried on the struggle in England, and it was later
taken up on the same lines by Archbishop Laud. The Protestant
Church in England had also not only to contend with the
Catholic, but to defend itself also against equally formidable
opponents, viz. the Calvinists, who, holding that all points of
Church doctrine as well as of belief are to be found settled for
us in the Bible, seemed to be aiming their attacks at the very
essence of true Protestantism, viz. at the independence of the

314

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN KELIGIOK [CHAP. XIII.

human conscience. They held that the corrupt nature of man
makes him incapable of approaching, by his own exertions,
towards a state of acceptance with God, or even of willing it
with earnest desire; that he is entirely a slave in the hands of a
Power outside himself. Hooker found himself called upon to
do battle for the Church of England when it was assailed, on
one side, by dangerous foes, who would destroy its doctrine
and ritual by an appeal to the traditions of the Church of Rome,
and protected on the other by these dangerous friends, who
appealed to a vague but equally dangerous authority in support
of their views. The Church of England seemed at that time to
most men merely an institution which had resulted from accidental political circumstances; from the efforts of the Tudors to
settle the disputed questions of the Reformation, or rather to
still controversy, by upholding a church which, within certain
limits, should be very tolerant. This was probably a true view
of the nature of its growth, but whatever may have been the
reasons of its establishment, Hooker, feeling the advantage and
the justice of its wide tolerance both in ritual and doctrine, was
enabled, by going deep into the foundations and actions of man's
moral nature, to justify its existence on broad and fundamental
principles. The Church of England being a successful compromise in practice, Hooker could justify this compromise in theory
by reference to the complexity of human nature, and to the wide
and true principles on which all true compromise rests. He
showed that man was indeed obedient to authority, but not to
any one authority; that as his nature was complex, so the
authorities he obeyed were complex; that in supernatural matters
of belief and of faith he was the creature of God, and taught by
revelation; but that in matters of church organisation, matters
too small for God to be concerned with, he was to direct himself
by the law of nature as it was revealed to him by reason. He
showed that this law of nature as revealed to man by reason was
what guided the conduct of individuals of societies, and of the
relations of societies among themselves. He justified thus the
organisation and ritual of the Church of England, and the action
of man's reason and will within the sphere of religion and
morality.
The immediate cause of his books of the Ecclesiastical Polity,
" a treatise in which I intend a justification of the laws of our
ecclesiastical polity," was the controversy in which he found
himself engaged with Travers, who, with Cartwright, Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity, represented the Calvinists, and

CHAP, X I I L ]

HOOKER.

315

with whom he came in contact after his appointment to the
Mastership of the Temple in 1584-5. Through Jewel, whose
influence had enabled him to become a student at Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, he became known to Sandys, Bishop of London,
by whom he was appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross in 1581.
This was his first appearance in public, and after it he became
gradually drawn into that controversy which made the business
of his life. Although Hooker had come under Calvinistic influence* in the course of his education, he had always refused to
be driven into the narrow Calvinistic creed: his width of mind
caused him to revolt against Calvinistic narrowness : and Travers,
who preached at the Temple in the afternoon, after Hooker had
preached there in the morning, made his sermons an attack on
Hooker's latitudinarianism. Whitgif t having silenced the public
expression of Travers' opinion, it became a personal controversy
between Hooker and Travers : and even Hallam, who calls these
most important religious controversies, vulgar quarrels, and those
engaged in them, " caitiff brawlers," is compelled to admit that
this controversy was carried on with the utmost decency and
good sense. Hooker is not only like " the knight of romance,"
who descends from higher spheres to cope with an adversary of
the ordinary world; but Travers, although narrower and in every
way inferior to Hooker, shows a keenness and shrewdness of
thought which dignified successful opposition to him, and at the
same time displayed a self-control and a respect for his adversary,
which did equal credit to both sides. The deep thought into
which this controversy plunged Hooker led him to ask the
bishop of London for a quiet appointment which would allow
him to complete it at leisure. " I am weary, my lord, of the
noise and opposition of this place; and indeed, God and nature
did not intend me for contention, but for study and quietness."
In his retirement at Boscombe, near Salisbury, he finished
four out of the proposed eight books on the Ecclesiastical Polity ;
in 1595 he moved to a better living near Canterbury, where he
wrote the remainder of his work, and remained till his death in
1600.
The first Book, " On Laws in General," is the most important from the literary point of view, as containing the best specimens of the drift of Hooker's thought and the best specimens of
his prose. The second Book refutes the principle that Scripture
is the exclusive rule of human conduct. The third Book deals
with "The Laws concerning Ecclesiastical Polity, whether the
form thereof be in Scripture so set down that no addition or

316

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP. XIII.

change is lawful." The fourth Book, " with the general exceptions
taken against the laws of our polity as being Popish, and banished out of certain Reformed Churches." The fifth, larger than
all the rest put together, deals with the laws that concern the
public religious duties of the Church and manner of ordaining
order. The sixth deals with the power of jurisdiction which
the Church claims over lay-elders, a question which had been
much agitated among the Puritans,—Cartwright in 1570 having
published a work which established in theory a supreme disposition of the Church over the lay-world in general, holding that the
State existed for the mere purpose of carrying out the decrees of the
Church. The seventh deals " with the power, and honour annexed
thereunto, in bishops." The eighth, " with the power of ecclesiastical dominion or supreme authority, which with us the highest
governor or prince hath, as well in regard of domestical jurisdiction as of that other foreignly claimed by the bishop of Rome."
The Introduction is concerned with the nature of all laws, in
order to make clear what is the special nature of that law which
governs the Church of England in her ritual and discipline. He
begins by saying that his task is hard; that it is far more easy
to raise a feeling for new institutions than to popularise the
old; that the difficulty of his task will be increased by the
difficulty of his reasoning and arguments, for his aim being to
criticise the foundation of law, he will be concerned with a
thing hidden to most people. Law, which he defines as a directive rule to goodness of operation, governs all intelligent working,
and therefore the working of God himself. The law which God
from the beginning hath set to himself to do all things by, has
for end a reason of his will, for all things which God does have
some end; for instance, God created woman, for he saw that it
would not be well if she were not created. Often no reason is
known to us, but that should never make us doubt the goodness
and the greatness of the end which God hath proposed to himself ; " the book of this law we are neither worthy nor able to
look into and open . . . that little whereof which we darkly
apprehend, we admire; the rest with religious ignorance we
humbly and meekly adore." Besides this law, in which we are
to have Faith, though its aim is hidden from us, there is (1) the
law which unconscious natural agents obey; (2) the law which
rules heavenly beings beyond our sphere; (3) the law of nature
discoverable by reason, which directs the conduct of individuals,
societies, and of the relation of societies among themselves; and
lastly, the divine law, which reveals supernatural things and

CHAP. XIII.]

HOOKER.

317

supplements that part of the law of nature which human reason
alone cannot discover.1
Nature is nothing else but God's instrument. " He made a
law for the rain. He gave his decree unto the sea that the
waters should not pass his commandment;" and in a passage
which shows his command over language, he asks what would
become of the world if nature failed in her obedience. " Now, if
nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, though
it were but for a while, the observation of her own laws ; if those
principal and mother elements of the world, whereof all things
in this lower world are made, should lose the qualities which they
now have; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our
heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should
forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volatility turn
themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the
lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied
course, should, as it were, through a languishing faintness, begin
to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from
her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend
themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds
breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth
be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine
away as children at the withered breasts of their mother, no
longer able to yield them relief; what could become of man
himself whom these now do all serve 1 See we not plainly that
obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the
whole world." But swervings, at least what appear to us to be
swervings, are sometimes incidental unto the course of nature;
for we must always remember that there are two laws to which
all things are subject,—first, the law " which directs them in the
means whereby they tend to their own perfection " ; and secondly,
"the law which binds them each to serve unto other's good,... and
all to prefer the good of the whole before whatsoever their own
particular . . . as we plainly see they do, when things natural
in that regard forget their ordinary natural wont; that which
is heavy mounting sometime upward of its own accord and forsaking the centre of the earth, which to itself is most natural,
even as if it did hear itself commanded to let go the good it
1
It should be noticed, as Mr. Church points out, that the term Law of
Nature is used by Hooker in three senses, applying it equally to the law
of creation, the law which God has set to himself to do all things by ;
to the law governing unconscious natural agents ; and to the law of human
nature discoverable by reason.

318

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP. XIII.

privately wisheth and to relieve the present distress of nature in
common."
And after having spoken of the law of angels in a tone of fervent religious enthusiasm, " lifting up our eyes (as it were) from
the footstool to the throne of God . . . to consider a little the
state of heavenly,and divine creatures . . . spirits immaterial
and intellectual, the glorious inhabitants of those sacred palaces,
where nothing but light and blessed immortality, no shadow of
matter for tears, discontentment, grief, and uncomfortable passions to work upon, but all joy, tranquillity, and peace, even for
ever and ever, doth dwell,"—Hooker goes on to discuss the
nature of the law by which men direct their conduct, both as
individuals, in relation to one another as members of a society,
and the laws which determine relation of societies among themselves. " I n all things," he says, "there is an appetite or
desire, whereby they incline to something which they may b e ;
and when they are it, they shall be perfecter than now they
are;"
All these perfections are comprehended under the term
goodness: it includes, first, the general perfection which all
things seek in desiring continuance of their being; secondly,
that perfection which each thing cultivates in imitating resemblance to God,—immutability and exactness. In following these
instincts man is following the law of nature. But besides these
laws which man unconsciously obeys, there are other laws which
man observes; these laws are equally part of the law of nature,
but obedience to them is not instructive; they are discoverable
by reason. Reason gives us a knowledge of truth and teaches
us what is the law that we are to observe: our will makes us
follow that law : our will makes us pursue that virtue which reason
points out. "And of discerning goodness there are but these
two ways; the one the knowledge of causes whereby it is made
such, the other the observation of those signs and tokens, which
being annexed always unto goodness, argue that where they are
found there also goodness is, although we know not the cause by
force whereof it is there." Some of the signs and general tokens
of good are found " in the general persuasion of men so accounting
it." As St. Augustine says, there are some things which stand
as principles universally agreed upon, and that out of those
principles, which are in themselves evident, the greatest moral
duties we owe towards God or man may without any great difficulty be concluded. And of some goodness the grounds are
clear and manifest without proof; as for instance, axioms or
principles such as this : " that the greater good is to be chosen

CHAP. XIII.]

HOOKER.

319

before the less," and axioms less general, but so apparent that
they need no proof, as " God is to be worshipped, parents to be
honoured, others to be used by us as we would be used by them."
Yet the will does not always follow what reason points out
to be good; " but let not any man think that this doth make
any thing for the just excuse of iniquity; it cannot be done
without the singular disgrace of nature, and the utter disturbance of that divine order whereby the pre-eminence of chiefest
acceptation is by the best things worthily challenged." Sometimes it happens because " we are abused with the show of that
which is not; sometimes the subtlety of Satan inveigling us as
it did with Eve; . . . sometimes the very custom of evil making
the heart obdurate against whatsoever instructions to the contrary, as in them over whom our Saviour spake, weeping, ' O
Jerusalem, how often, and they wouldst not/ but when they are
broken it is to the singular disgrace of nature, and God as the
author of the laws of nature is their avenger."
Then Hooker shows how reason doth lead men into the
making of human laws, " whereby politic societies are governed,
and to agreement about laws whereby the fellowship of communion of independent societies standeth," and proceeds, in order
to show the nature of these laws, to investigate the origin of
society. Society is a " union brought about by natural inclination in order to supply the defects and imperfections which are
in us living solely and singly. . . . The manner of this union was
either expressly or secretly agreed upon, the first and primary
law being that every individual was so to frame his outward
actions that they be no hindrance to the common good for which
the society was instituted." Observe, says Hooker, the progress that the world has made since the institution of society;
" we, indeed, make complaint of the iniquity of our times, and
not unjustly, for the days are evil; but compare them with
those times wherein there were no civil societies, with those
times wherein there was as yet no manner of public regiment
established, with those times wherein there were not above eight
persons righteous living upon the face of the earth,—and we
have surely good cause to think that God hath blessed us
exceedingly, and hath made us behold most happy days." All
public regiment of " what kind soever seemeth evidently to have
risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and compositions
between men judging it convenient and behoveful, . . . without
which consent *there was no reason that one man should take
upon him to be lord or judge over another; because, although

320

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP, xnr,

there be, according to the opinion of some very great and
judicious men, a kind of natural right in the noble, wise, and
virtuous to govern them which are of servile disposition, nevertheless, for manifestation of this their right, and men's more
peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are
to be governed seemeth necessary." This was the slight and
insufficient foundation of that celebrated theory of the " Original
Contract," a theory which, enlarged by Hobbes and Locke,
played such a large and important part in political controversies.
It served to oppose the theory of divine right of kings, first
formulated by James I., and extended by Filmer.
This theory of a prehistoric race who drew up the Original
Contract, " who saw that to live by one man's will became the
cause of all men's misery," and that no potentate can justly make
laws unless by express command from Cod or by consent of
those governed, not only served to fight the intellectual battle
against the theory of royal tyranny, but gave the first suggestions
of a theory of representation; for " t o be commanded we do
consent when that society whereof we are part hath at any time
before consented without revoking the same after by the like
universal agreement." If we are bound by our representatives
in the past we can be bound by our representatives in the
present and in the future. Thus, in Hooker's theory of political
and social law, we see the germ of a political philosophy.
" Happy is the nation," it is said, " which has no political philosophy, for such philosophy is generally the offspring of the
symptoms of an approaching revolution." The causes of the
further development of political theory were found in the troubled
times which preceded the Revolutions of 1642 and 1688. In
order to oppose Filmer's theory of the divine right of kings, of
a tyranny which was lawful because it was exercised by Cod's
delegate, this theory of the " Original Contract" was extended
and developed. The king, by his despotism, was violating the
agreement that had been made between governor and governed
in this prehistoric time. It was a weak theory, indeed, having
no hold, as the other one had, over religiously disposed minds;
but it was one which served to support the practice of the
developed national will, which required more and more that
attention and regard should be paid to its interests, till in 1688
it triumphed, and the theory of Divine Eight disappeared for
ever.
Also belonging to the law of nature discoverable by reason is
the law regulating the conduct of societies between themselves,

CHAP, XIII.]

HOOKER.

321

—the primary being concerned with nations in time of peace,
rules concerning ambassadors, etc., the secondary with the rules
of war. The strength and virtue of the law of nations are such
that no particular nation can lawfully prejudice the same by any
of their several laws and ordinances, more than a man, by his
private resolutions, the law of the whole community. And in
speaking of international society, Hooker shows his belief in the
efficacy of councils as promoting national harmony, a belief so
strong in the minds of many Elizabethans, who still believed that
the harmony of thought and belief, which the Eeformation had
for ever upset, might be re-established on a reasonable and tolerant
basis by the action of councils. " A grievous abuse there has
been of councils," he says, probably thinking of the Council of
Constance, of the Diet of Augsburg, of the Council of Trent, all
of which, called upon to promote harmony in Christendom, had
ended in a worse schism than those they were called upon to
amend. " But this abuse should rather cause men to study how
so gracious a thing may again be reduced to that first perfection,
than in regard of stains and blemishes sithence growing be held
for ever in extreme disgrace."
Hooker had before said that " the law of reason, considered
as natural law, is not extended to contain in it all manner of
laws whereunto reasonable creatures are bound, but is restrained
to those only duties which all men, by force of natural wit, either
do or might understand to be such duties as concern all men."
He now passes on to consider that law supernatural, of which
the record and exponent is Scripture, and which, presupposing
and embodying the law natural or rational, adds knowledge and
guidance beyond it, and makes up for its default and completes
it. This law directs man in his pursuit of that higher happiness,
that estate whereby we attain the full possession of that which
simply for itself is to be desired. This desire, though of such
perfection, we are not capable of in this life, is as natural, though
higher than the sensual and the intellectual, " for although the
beauties, riches, honours, sciences, virtues, and perfections of all
men living were in the present possession of one, yet somewhat
beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for;" and thus the end being divine, the rules
which aid us in its attainment are supernatural—first, in the means
of delivering them by direct revelation from God, and secondly, in
themselves, the things delivered being directly ordained by God.
This law contains all things necessary to be known in order to
be saved, which could not at all, or could not easily, be known
Y

322

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP, XIII

by light of natural discourse. " It telleth us of certain things,
presupposing certain principles, whereof it receivethus already persuaded, and then instructeth us in all the residue necessary. In
Scripture, besides the revelation of laws strictly supernatural, we
find such natural laws as we could not easily have found out
alone; also the application of certain laws in order to make them
clearer, as, for instance, when it is not clear what the law of
nature requires in certain circumstances." Then, in speaking of
the benefit of having divine laws written, Hooker approaches the
realm of controversy : having written record of divine commands,
he says " we are in noways bound to yield to the traditions of
Eomethe same reverence that we do to written law;" for history
and common-sense show us how report is maimed when it passes
through several hands. The law of God contains things absolutely necessary unto salvation; and Scripture is the direct revelation of God's will: the fact that he ceased to speak to us after
the New Testament was given us, is a sign that all things necessary to our salvation are sufficiently known, and those who add
traditions, says Hooker, as a part of supernatural law and necessary truth, " have not the truth but are in error." Some things,
indeed, are not expressly told u s ; but these things, which have
not express literal mention, can be easily deduced from what he
has told us. There may, perhaps, be some doubt how far to
proceed by collection and deduction before the full and complete
measure of things necessary to salvation be made up. Many of
the Church's most important beliefs have been deduced, as the
belief in the Trinity, the co-eternity of the Son with the Father,
the duty of baptising. Of none of these is express mention
made. " But," says Hooker, plunging into the controversy with
a vigour which is perhaps not quite equalled by the reasonable
force of his argument, " let necessary collection be made (i.e. of
things necessary to salvation, a premise in itself vague and differing according to authority), and we may boldly deny that of
all those things which at this day are with so great necessity
urged upon this Church under the name of reformed church discipline, there is any one which these books hitherto have made
manifest to be contained in Scripture." Thus he directly contradicts Cartwright, who laid down that " the discipline of Christ's
Church, that is necessary for all time, is delivered by Christ
and set down in Holy Scripture," and proceeds to strengthen
his view by reference to the constitution of the Church. The
Church is a society of two kinds—first, an ordinary civil society,
constituted on the same grounds as any other civil society;

CHAP. XIII.]

HOOKEE.

323

secondly, it is a society supernatural. In the first case it is governed by laws which the men in that society agree to make—
positive laws—laws not natural, in that they do not grow out of
the unchangeable conditions originally imposed in the world,
sometimes mutable, i.e. varying as to time and place. In the
second case, as a society supernatural, it is governed by supernatural laws revealed directly from God. They, too, are positive
laws, sometimes mutable and sometimes immutable, depending
on the subject-matter to which they are applicable. They are
concerned with the substance of the service of God, which, so far
forth as it hath in it anything more than the law of reason doth
teach, must be received from God himself. But the first sort of
rules which concern the Church as a human society have to do,
not with the substance of the service of God, but with outward
rules and ordinances : these principles are indeed deduced from
Scripture, but the laws themselves are imposed by man on himself. Nor is it illogical, considering the nature of the ecclesiastical society, to search the Scriptures for the ordering of these
things; but it is to derogate from the reverend authority and
dignity of Scripture, to go by the letter of Scripture in this respect, " n o less than they do by whom Scriptures are in ordinary
talk very idly applied unto vain and childish trifles."
Hooker's justification of the Church of England brought him
no adherents from the Puritan side. He was unable to stop the
great Puritan movement, to hinder the rise and predominance of
the sect who searched the Scriptures for guidance in Church and
personal affairs, whose talk was a mass of texts, or tinged with
scriptural phraseology; but when the time of narrow religious
warfare had passed, Hooker's ecclesiastical polity was taken as
the foundation of the Anglican Church, the representative of
the religious views of a great nation. He gave it a defensible
theory, broad and intelligible, even if incomplete and open to
attack.
" H e brought out the noble features of the system
he defended: its fitness to be the Church of a great nation, its
adaptation to human nature and society, the reasonableness of
its customs, the largeness of its aims, the freedom and elevation
of its spirit in principles and working." Whatever faults may be
found in it from the point of view of the ideal institution, its adaptation to the needs of the English nation was eyident. This
was shown in the crisis of 1688. The nation, frightened by the
result of their resistance to royal oppression in 1642,—a resistance
which had resulted in worse tyranny, the despotism of Cromwell's
military government,—were cowed and willing to endure any

324

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP. XIIT.

amount of civil tyranny; but when Charles II. interfered with
the safety of the Church by the Test Act, when James II.
showed his intention of ruining it by means of the dispensing
power, then only the nation found the strength and will to resist,
and brought about the movement of 1688, so vastly important in
its political results.
In the wide and philosophical survey which Hooker takes in
order to strengthen his theory of the Church, and in order to
refute the Puritans, he argues sometimes from authority; and
his arguments, even when not based on authority, are wanting in
reason : but his work must be regarded as a whole. And it is
evident that " his whole theory rests on the principle that the
paramount and supreme guide both of will and human action is
reason: and if we care to give him," says Mr. Church, " his
' fundamental position/ the key to his method of arguing, it is
to be found in his doctrine, so pertinaciously urged and always
implied, of the concurrence and co-operation, each in its due place,
of all possible means of knowledge for man's direction." " To
measure by any one kind of law all the actions of men were to
confound the admirable order, wherein God hath disposed all
laws each as in nature, so in degree distinct from the other."
Thus to introduce the idea of complex law, to which man was
obedient by the light of reason, was perhaps Hooker's greatest
work. Before his time man was simply the slave of authority,
a creature not free even in his aspirations. Hooker breathed the
spirit of the Renaissance when he spoke of man's dignified
obedience to a law which he recognised by his reason \ and by
introducing the idea of law into the sphere of moral and social
thought, he gave one of the freest impulses to that line of thought
which was to discover the reign of law in all departments of
human life, that idea which is at the root of all progress both in
intellectual and practical life. Hooker, with Bacon, was the first
to suggest to the English the notion of evolution by law, which
step by step, says an anonymous writer quoted by Mr. Kingsley
in his essay The Roman and the Teuton, is transforming the whole
field of our knowledge and opinion. " I t is not one order of
conception that comes under its influence; but it is the whole
sphere of our ideas, and with them the whole system of our
action and conduct. Not the physical world alone is now the
domain of inductive science, but the moral, the intellectual, the
spiritual are being added to its empire. Two co-ordinate ideas
pervade the vision of every thinker—physicist or moralist, philosopher or priest. In the physical and moral world, in the natural

CHAP. XIII.]

HOOKER.

325

and the human, are ever seen two forces, invariable rule and continual advance : law and action : order and progress : these two
powers working harmoniously together, and the result, inevitable
sequence, orderly movement, irresistible growth. In the physical
world, indeed, order is most prominent to our eyes; in the moral
world it is progress, but both exist as truly in the one as in the
other. . . . It was the last task of the astronomer to show
eternal change even in the grand order of the solar system. It
is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law even in the
complex action of human life."
And lastly, Hooker showed that prose-writing could be artistic
while at the same time expressing the most complex and subtle
thought. Ascham, Latimer, in language pleasing because it is
simple, had expressed earnest thoughts ; but in their mental life
there was little complexity, and their manner of expression
showed that they had no power of self-criticism—little power in
the selection and ordering of thought. They are childish, sometimes garrulous, full of what they want to say with very little
power of saying it.
/
Then came the reaction in the school of Lyly and his followers,
when expression was everything, meaning nothing—when style
in the best hands reached such a pitch that readers forgot to seek
for a meaning, or were content with a very little one. There was
frequently barely enough to give a raison d'etre to the elaborate
sentences and passages. Prose showed first what it could be in
the hands of Hooker. It became a fully-developed instrument
in his hands. It expressed thought which, in addition to being
earnest, was profound and complex, with all the clearness and
simplicity of Ascham and Latimer, and in a harmonious, wellproportioned, stately, and graceful style, which showed that Hooker
had all the artistic perceptions of the Euphuists. He was not
only suggestive of the possibilities of prose-writing in the English
language: he was distinctly a prose-artist himself. " He not
only opened the mine, but he explored the depths of our native
eloquence. So stately and graceful is the march of his periods,
so various the fall of the musical cadences upon the ear, so rich
in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave and noble his
diction, so little of vulgarity is there in his racy idiom, of
pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not," says Hallam,
"whether any later writer has more admirably displayed the
capacities of our language, or produced passages more worthy of
comparison with the splendid monuments of antiquity." The
cumbrousness of Elizabethan prose, the tendency to imitate Latin

326

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION, [CHAP. XIIT.

construction, the habit of putting into one long sentence with a
variety of clauses what we should now make several sentences of,
the disorganisation of the sentence which he sometimes indulged
in with the view of putting the emphatic word in the most
emphatic place, in order to render the argument clearer,—all
these are but minor disadvantages which cannot detract from
his great merits, his instinctive sense of the fitness of words to
thought, his capacity of suiting his phrase to the intellectual
mood, the enthusiasm and fervour of his eloquence. As Fuller
says, it was only " where the copiousness of his style met not
with proportionable capacity in his auditors that he wTas unjustly
censured for perplext, tedious, and obscure. . . . Such as would
patiently attend and give him credit all the reading and hearing
of his sentences had their expectation ever paid at the close
thereof." As for the charm of his style, its harmony and grace,
its capacities for delicacy and grandeur, it has not only procured
for him the admiration of Swift, who singles him out with Parsons,
the Jesuit, as the master of a style simple and natural, which
could be read without offence in the days of Addison, but it procured the full recognition of the Puritan age in which he lived,
which, finding in it a proof of his undue regard for culture in its
study of form, in its classical allusions and quotations, made it
the subject of sneer and ridicule.
Therefore not only in the history of thought, but as a master
of what constitutes true literature, the art of giving adequate
and attractive expression to thought, Hooker has claims to lasting
fame.

CHAPTER

XIV.

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE.
BACON, Francis, b. 1560-1 ; studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1573 ;
entered at Gray's Inn, 1576 ; admitted as barrister, 1582 ; sat in
Parliament as member for Melcombe Regis, 1584; trial of Essex and
Southampton, 1600-1 ; knighted by James I., 1603 ; marriage, 1606 ;
made Solicitor-General, 1607 ; made Attorney-General, 1613 ; made a
Privy Councillor, 1616; made Lord Keeper, 1616-7; made Lord
Chancellor, 1617-8 ; created Baron Verulam, 1618 ; created Viscount
St. Alban, 1620-1 ; sentenced by the House of Lords, 1621 ; d. 1626.
Advancement of Learning, 1605 ; Novum Organum, 1620; History of
Henry VII., 1622; Historia Naturalis et Experimentalise 1622;
Three editions of the Essays, 1597, 1612, 1625.

THE name of Bacon is as important in the history of Elizabethan
literature as is that of Shakspere. Bacon, like Shakspere, was
part of the " soul of his age." He also embodied the spirit of
the Renaissance, which urged men not only to the development
and exercise of the faculties, but to the study of the world and
of the conditions of human life. It stimulated them to make
those enquiries which can alone render progress possible, for
it is the systematic study of nature which makes a higher future
for man a tangible and attainable thing. Scientific knowledge
alone can give man that power over nature necessary to the
highest civilisation, necessary too to the highest art, " the spirit
and pure breath of knowledge." Bacon by his method, by his
endeavour to discover the laws which govern the workings of
nature, began the great scientific work of the modern world.
Actual knowledge he did not give us, but he pointed out the
path which all discoverers have followed.
Even if Bacon's name was not famous as coming first in the
great list of English scientific workers, he would yet have a claim
to the interest of posterity, through his more purely literary work
and because of his strange and puzzling personality. A typical
Elizabethan in his vigorous versatility, in his varied career at

328

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE,

[CHAP. XIV.

once practical and literary, he stood above his great age in virtue
of his gigantic intellectual power, but below it in his cold, passionless nature, incapable of the generous impulses of the later Elizabethans, and incapable of understanding the high ideal morality
of the earlier.
" My conceit of his person was never increased towards him
by his place or his honours; but I have and do reverence him
for the greatness that was only proper to himself : in that he
seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and
most worthy of admiration that had been in many ages. In his
adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength, for
greatness he could not want." Thus speaks Ben Jonson; in
moral greatness he may be wanting; in intellectual greatness,
" by his work," he will ever be one of the greatest and most
admirable of men.
Francis Bacon was the son of a statesman, who was a fit
representative of the race of politicians that came midway
between the overbearing and imperious race of Hotspurs, Cliffords, and Nevilles, and the dashing but more statesmanlike
race represented by Essex and Baleigh. " Nicholas Bacon," says
Macaulay, " was deliberate, diplomatic, sincere but not zealous,
resolute but often apparently vacillating, speculative, yet in
actual life no man more free from theory." Such men as he,
Mildmay, Burghley, and Walsingham, were admirably adapted
to carry England through the critical years of the early part of
Elizabeth's reign, when a tortuous, apparently irresolute policy
was required to maintain her independence amidst the designs
of a threatening Europe. Francis Bacon was born at a time
when this policy was of all others most called for. In 1562 the
Council of Trent, unsuccessful in what efforts it made to reunite
a profoundly divided Christendom, had broken up. In 1566-7
happened the revolt of the Netherlands, the execution of Counts
Egmont and Horn; in 1572 was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew : what wonder then that Bacon, from inheritance and early
experience, conceived the idea that a turning and twisting and
tortuous policy was a necessity in the dealings of states and men \
for only the dubiously sincere policy of Elizabeth's statesman
could, by allowing England to take neither side openly, have
steered her safely through these difficulties.
This endeavour to gain support from both sides, while belonging to neither, is painfully evident in Bacon's political career.
In 1584 he represented Melcombe Regis in the House of Commons, and endeavoured to play the very difficult game of obtain-

CHAP. X I V . ]

BACON.

329

ing the favour of both king and people. It was on the delicate
question of * subsidies that Bacon first came forward prominently
and posed as a popular champion. The Court had asked for supplies. Bacon opposed them in a speech on a motion for a grant
of three subsidies to be payable in four years. " We are here to
search the wounds of the realm and not to skim them over," he
says, " to grant subsidies at once will be to breed discontent and
endanger her Majesty's safety,"—it will be a bad precedent for
popular liberties. But Bacon found that the philosophic mind
which sees two sides to things was then out of place in politics.
His speech was resented by the Queen; but once more in 1597
he speaks on the Liberal side in Parliament against enclosures :
this was the last time he ever appeared in opposition to
Government. He now began that study of self-interest which
ended in his becoming " a peremptory royalist." In 1593 and
1595, having sued unsupported, and therefore unsuccessfully, first
for the post of Attorney- and then for that of Solicitor-General,
he turned to Essex, who was then just rising, and in whom
Bacon, with characteristic sagacity, saw the promise of success.
Essex, who seems to have recognised the greatness of Bacon,
made him in 1795 a present of an estate to console him for his
disappointment. The Device which he wrote for Essex on this
occasion seems to show real gratitude and friendship; but his
conduct in Essex's trial in 1601 seems to show how subordinate a
place friendship held in his mind in comparison with his cherished
worldly aims. In this little treatise he draws the character of a
hollow statesman, prophetic with an irony which Fate has made
to recoil on the author. " Let him make himself cunning in the
humours and drifts of persons more than in the nature of business
and affairs . . . and ever let him take the side that is likeliest
to be followed." Perhaps Bacon himself was shocked at first
with the moral dangers of a successful political career. Although
on James's accession he tried to obtain his favour, although he
gladly accepted knighthood from him, yet he says : " I desire to
meddle as little as possible in the King's causes : I desire to put
my ambition wholly upon my pen." But his talents were now
well known, particularly his genius for public speaking, to which
Ben Jonson bears such admiring testimony. " There happened
in my time," he says, " one noble speaker who was full of gravity
in his speaking. His language when he could spare or pass by
a jest was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly,
more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered." Often, therefore, was he chosen to

330

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

be spokesman for the House of Commons when in conference
with the Lords : his diplomatic talent, to use no worse an adjective, had made the road to power easy to him. He became
successively Solicitor-General, Member for the University of Cambridge, Privy Councillor, Lord Keeper, Lord Chancellor, being
made in 1618 Lord Verulam, in 1620 Viscount St. Albans.
Even his disgrace and fall in 1620, when the charges against
him of taking money for despatch of suits were investigated and
proved, when he wrote "the humble submission of me, the Lord
Chancellor," could not quench his ambition. His imprisonment
being ended by a pardon under the Great Seal, he retired in 1621;
but in 1623 he sued, though unsuccessfully, for the Provostship
of Eton, and even when convinced by this failure that further
worldly success was denied him, yet, by the grandeur of his residence, by the splendour of his living, even when in what he
termed "his retirement," he showed that the world and its
"vanities" had still vast attractions for him. " D o what we
can," says Prince Charles, " this man refuses to go out like a
snuff."
To disentangle Bacon's political views from the facts of his
self-interested and chequered career is impossible. We have to
refer to his essays, those autobiographical notes of his life,
sincere and genuine as statements of his thought, "set down
significantly rather than curiously," sometimes showing the unconsideredness of impulse in their inconsistency. We gather
from them that Bacon's one fundamental political object was
national unity. All his minor political aims centre round this
one great object. In Bacon's political creed we see not only the
well-considered belief of a thoughtful statesman, but also, on one
point at least, the expression of the national instinct. National
unity, he held, was only to be preserved by war : war was to
the body politic what exercise was to the human body: war
alone could give that health to the country which would ensure
in its constitution the harmonious working of all members of the
body politic. Bacon was no upholder of despotism : he believed
firmly in the symmetry of the constitution, which consists in the
mutual beneficial action of King and Commons. Balance was
everything to Bacon. In the predominance of the French
nobility over the middle class he saw possibilities of danger which
the future only too soon realised. Each class in the body politic
was to move freely within its own sphere : predominance was to
be given to none. The King was like the sun, a heavenly body,
moving round another heavenly body which it benefits. And

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

331

Bacon in practice was always true to this theory. He never
systematically objected to Parliaments : he always recommended
the King to summon them: he attributed their failure to the
fact that they were not rightly treated. The Parliament ought
to be considered as a council, consisting of the clergy, the Lords,
and the Commons : it should be summoned by the King to hear
and discuss plans and propositions. " What touches our self shall
be last served," this ought to be the motto of the King in his
dealings with Parliament. But Parliament was never to take the
initiative: it was to be the servant and counsellor, though a
willing one, of the King. Bacon especially lamented the struggles,
characteristic of this political epoch, which took place on the
questions of supply: he objected to the great constitutional
principle, "redress of grievances must precede supply," as involving no essential connection. Parliament must not be a place
where the King barters away the chips of the royal prerogative :
the King's prerogative is law, and the principal part of law; if
he wishes for money it is the duty of the Parliament to grant it
without demanding redress of grievances as a right. Of the
nature of the constitutional struggle which was gradually transferring power from King to Parliament Bacon had no conception.
He found ideal unity in his theory of the balance of the then
existing forces of the constitution, and to preserve this unity was
the object of political action. Parliament was not to encroach
on the King, nor the King on Parliament: Parliament must
not make objections to furnishing the King with supplies, but
the King must not be exorbitant in his demands. The strength
and greatness of a country can never co-exist with heavy taxation.
" The blessing of Judah and Issachar will never meet: that the
same nation should be both the lion's whelp and the ass between
burdens." The strength and greatness of a country depend on
its capacity for war, for that alone can give it the needful exercise, that alone can prevent civil war. And in advocating war
Bacon was but following a national instinct. England, like some
of the other states of Europe, had just formally emancipated
herself from the control, both temporal and ecclesiastical, of the
Papacy. She had had throughout Elizabeth's reign great difficulty in preserving her national independence ; she had only succeeded by pursuing a cautious and diplomatic defensive policy.
At the end of Elizabeth's reign she found herself the champion
in Europe of a new system, the head of a Protestant system of
states, thoroughly independent in government and religion. The
old system was still powerful: it was the duty of the new system

332

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IK SCIENCE,

[CHAP. XIV.

now to make itself felt by an aggressive policy: England was
strong enough for this aggressive policy, which had been
begun in the brilliant aggressive expeditions of Essex and
Baleigh against Spain, the representative of the old system.
With the overthrow of the Papacy in Europe went also the old
idea of the regulation of the international relations of countries;
there was no longer even any nominal arbiter of international
affairs, neither a system of embassies nor the codification of
international custom to act as law had yet begun. In this
transitorial condition, when states were expanding, when the
old system represented by Spain (still powerful in reality and
far more formidable in men's imagination) was struggling against
the new system represented by England, war was inevitable; it
was only thus that the permanent relations of states could be
settled; it was the only means that either system had of spreading its influence. Bacon, therefore, by his theory of the body
politic, and the exercise necessary to keep it in health, was unconsciously formulating the political philosophy of the time.
In his vast ideas of the foundation of a monarchy of the West,
which the King might achieve by following a grand foreign
policy, which would have for its object the colonising of the wilds
of Scotland, the civilising of Ireland, the annexation of the Low
Countries, he was but putting into practical words the political
ideal of his time, the vision of Spenser, the ideal England of
Shakspere and Milton. Later Bacon lost sight of his great
ideas; he had devoted himself to the service of James \ he had
forged for himself fetters which had chained down his soul, and
which he could not shake off; he saw himself helpless in the
obedience of a king whose great object of ambition was the
Spanish marriage.
The inherent weakness in Bacon's character, which in all
other spheres as well as in this made his practice so divergent
from his theory, is not explained merely by reference to the
ordinary motives of self-interest, but has a far different and a
far more complicated cause. If we can accept the theory that
Bacon believed himself to have a mission, that he believed himself destined to accomplish great things in the field of knowledge
for mankind, that he saw that his only way to do this was by
filling a post which should give him influence with men, by
devoting himself to the service of the great of this world, who
could help him on with this scheme; if we accept this theory
—and there is every reason that we should do so, for Bacon was
as sincere as he was often inconsistent in his statements con-

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

333

cerning himself—we must not pass sentence on him till we
have judged him by the exceptional standards he set up for
himself; and then we shall find an explanation, though by no
means an excuse, for the course of his life, which appears at
first sight so contemptible, so morally common. Bacon's great
object in life wTas entirely different from that of most people : he
had no desire to save his own soul \ he had no fervent belief in
and love for a God; he had no fervent belief in or fondness for
any human being to give him a motive power in life; he had
no poetic and ideal enthusiasm for humanity; no belief of the
ordinary kind was a power over his conduct. But the belief
that had influence over his life, that gave him ideas of duty,
was this, that by devotion to the cause of knowledge, he might
achieve one of the greatest things that life and the world could
offer.
ISText to Shakspere among great Elizabethans stands
Bacon. "Art, the spirit and finer breath of life," reached
its highest point in our great dramatist, but the discovery of
truth concerning the conditions of man's life, concerning his
place in nature, was the cherished aim of Bacon's existence:
he lived his highest life when struggling to advance this aim.
" Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the enquiry of
truth (which is the love-making or wooing of it), the knowledge
of truth (which is the presence of it), the belief of truth (which
is the enjoying of it), is the sovereign good of human nature."
"What is comparable," he says, " t o standing on the vantage
ground of truth, a hill not to be commanded, and where the air
is always clear and serene." To reach this hill many a slough
must be passed, and if Bacon left the ordinary paths of morality
what wonder that he lost himself hopelessly in them. If we,
then, give up entirely the idea that Bacon was an ordinary man
and to be judged by ordinary standards, we can look more
calmly, though not with approval, on his conduct in the two principal crises of his life.
In the career of Essex, says Macaulay, we see exemplified
that struggle for court patronage, which came midway between
the political struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Essex—brave, high-spirited, generous, bold in his attitude towards
his sovereign, delicate towards his dependants—was eminently
the successful statesman of the period. Friendship, not gratitude,
was what he desired from those below him: this is what we
have every reason to believe Bacon, as far as lay in his nature,
gave him: and he in turn was fascinated and dazzled by the
powers of Bacon. Baffled in his attempts to befriend him by

334

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

giving him responsible posts, he is careful, on leaving England
in 1596 for Spain, to commend his interests to his friends.
But in 1598 came the quarrel between Essex and the Queen,
which had been growing for some time before. His popularity
generally was on the wane: the Queen was annoyed with his
arrogant and bold manners towards her: he was scornfully
defiant to her and to his enemies: and he crowned all by a
career of failure in Ireland, which he governed shamefully,
displaying all the defects that a statesman could possess. The
Court at last ceased to give him credit for the virtues he could
claim: they hindered him in his brilliant and really politic
exploits against Spain, of which the affair of Cadiz was an
example. Bacon stood by Essex and served him as long as he
could do it without injury to himself. He had tried to dissuade
him from accepting the government of Ireland, knowing that
his impulsiveness and want of caution could not fail to bring
him thus prominently into trouble : and when his anticipations
were fulfilled and Essex returned in disgrace, Bacon did his best
to mediate between him and the Queen, and experienced the
reward of most mediators : Essex thought him wanting in zeal
as a friend, Elizabeth wanting in duty as a subject. Thus, when
Essex was brought before the Council to answer for his conduct
in Ireland, Bacon, after a faint attempt to excuse himself,
appeared in support of the charge against the Earl, and when
Essex, reckless with despair, conspires against the Queen, Bacon
appears as counsel for the prosecution. In these circumstances
three courses were open to Bacon : if he had been an enthusiastic
friend, believing above all other things in the sacredness of the
tie of friendship, he would have firmly stood by Essex, supporting him when he was right, palliating his conduct when
wrong: he might, secondly, have been neutral, and this, considering Bacon's nature and his aims in life, would have been the
most disgraceful course. The third course was the one which
he actually did pursue, and one quite in accordance with his
theory of life. Friendship to him was an important thing and
an elevated thing. " Whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast and not
from humanity": but friendships are contracted but for the
mutual interests of either party. " A principal part of friendship
is the ease and discharge of the fulness of the heart which
passions of all kinds do cause and induce . . . no receipt openeth
the heart but a true friend: to whom you may impart griefs,
joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

335

the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession."
One wonders rather what reception Bacon would have given to
a friend who came to him for the like " civil shrift or confession."
And besides this first noble part of friendship there are two
others, support of the judgment, and the last part "which is
like the pomegranate, full of many kernels, aid and bearing a
part in all actions and occasions."
"But," says Bacon, "although friendship has these many noble
uses, let us always remember the precept of Bias, that we must
ever treat a friend, remembering that some day he may become
an enemy." Now Bacon had enjoyed with Essex friendship of
what he considered the purest kind, the friendship of dependant
and superior when there can be no jealousy, but mutual benefits
conferred; but when Essex forfeited the Queen's favour, and thus
endangered Bacon's position as his friend, with regard to the
Queen, was not Bacon justified, according to his own peculiar
theory of life, in casting off his friend 1 For had not Essex
become his enemy : if Bacon had not taken active steps to put
himself on the other side, would not Essex have lost for Bacon
the hope of attaining his life's desire, his aim of advancing the
kingdom of man over nature, that great work which he thought
would end futilely without the co-operation of the great 1 He
says of Essex, fourteen years after, speaking of the beginning of
their friendship, " I held at that time my Lord to be the fittest
instrument to do good to the state, and therefore I applied myself to him in a manner which I think rarely happeneth among
men." When Essex could no longer serve a purpose—indeed when
he became dangerous to that purpose—Bacon had no scruple in
throwing him over. And we cannot render his conduct more
amiable in our eyes by thinking that it cost him any effort: for
little place, and very little hold on his heart had the feelings for
his fellow-beings. "The stage is more beholding to love than
the life of man. . . . In life," he says, " it does much mischief.
They do best, who, if they cannot but admit love, make it keep
quarter and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions
of life. For if it check once with business, it troubleth men's
fortunes—maketh men that they can no-wise be true to their own
ends." " The best works and of greatest merit for the public
have proceeded from the unmarried and childless men . . . yet,"
he adds, with a desire to do justice to this side of life, "certainly wife and children are a discipline of humanity, because
they make frequent and strong calls upon tenderness." Probably
then, Bacon, so destitute of the larger emotional life, had little

336

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XJV.

compunction in giving up his friend. He is actually vindictive
in his treatment of him at the trial. He compares him, in his
speech, to Pisistratus, who by exhibiting self-inflicted wounds
had established tyranny at Athens : thus he crushes Essex's one
plea in defence of his conduct—a plea which, if taken up, might
have procured him at least a pardon, viz. that the powerful and
inveterate enemies surrounding him had just ruined him in the
Queen's favour; that their persecutions had driven him into the
despair which urged him to his reckless deeds. And when
Essex reproaches him, Bacon answers him with shuffling inconsistency, confused by the intellectual difficulties of the part he
had undertaken, but showing no remorse for the friendship he
had killed and the friend he was about to ruin. All he ever did
by way of excusing himself was to say, in succeeding ages, that
the arguments of his " Declaration of the Practices and Eeasons
attempted and committed by Eobert, Earl of Essex," had all
been furnished by Government. This, then, was what friendship
meant to the philosopher, who used life and the things of the
world, not like the equally selfish mystic of the Middle Ages, as
a means to save his own soul, but as a means to reach the kingdom of truth, and to spread its clear serene light over the world.
Thus did Bacon, by his morigeration, by his study of the worst
side of human nature, by his endeavour to subordinate life and
people to his own ends, sell his soul to the devil more emphatically even than did Faust.
So dim did he render his moral
consciousness, that he failed in one of the great crises of his life
to recognise even intellectually the broadest distinction between
right and wrong. In the year 1620, following on the impeachment of Sir Silas Mompesson and Sir Francis Mitchell, there was
appointed a Committee of the Lower House to examine into the
state of justice. Various cases of bribery were exposed, and by
the mouth of one of its members it was stated that " the person
against whom these things are alleged is no less than the Lord
Chancellor, a man so endued with all parts both of nature and
art, as that I will say no more of him, not being able to say
enough." This enquiry had been instituted at the instance of a
suitor in Chancery, who had experienced ruin through the delays
of the Court. He received a hint that £100 judiciously disposed would quicken matters. He borrowed the money at high
interest. The Chancellor took the money, but the decree passed
against him. This charge was only one out of twenty-three
cases, in which the Chancellor was found guilty of having
accepted money: but his astonishment at the result of the

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

337

enquiry, his interest in the summonses and the dealings of the
Parliament, which impeached the other two officers of the Crown,—
proceedings which, if he had been conscious of guilt, would have
made him nervous,—plainly prove that his moral consciousness
had ceased to show him the difference between right and wrong,
that his conduct was the result of moral blindness, and not of
the expectation of not being detected. Also, it was probably
true that the sums he received were more of the nature of gifts
than of bribes : we have no evidence that they influenced Bacon
in his sentences; they may, however, have had great influence on
the despatch of business, on the order of the cases. When the
consequences of his course of action were made plain to Bacon,
he behaved with all that abjectness and want of dignity which
is inseparable from moral commonness, after vainly trying first to
work upon the fears of the King, then on those of his officers,
then of his advisers, pointing out the danger of this accusation
as a precedent. "Upon advised consideration of the charges,
descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to
account so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess
that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence,"
adding " Be merciful to a broken reed," and concluding with an
inconsistency apparent, not real: " I was the justest judge that
was in England these fifty years : but it was the justest censure
in Parliament that was these two hundred years."
Bacon's career is made sadder to us by reading the Essays,
because in them we find traces of those purer feelings which he
had done all he could to crush. At the end of his life he might
feel that love and friendship and feeling for children were but
the discipline of humanity—that the man who best advanced the
kingdom of Truth was he who had no ties; but at the beginning
of his career, before he was so well disciplined in the art of
advancement of life, must he not have felt sincerely what he says
in his essay on " Friendship ": " For a crowd is not company, and
faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling
cymbal, where there is no love." Then perhaps he realised that
it might be hard to renounce the world for the sake of science;
but he says it is a weakness, " the solecism of power, to think to
command the end, and yet not to endure the mean."
The
furtherance of truth was his end, the discovery of the unity of
nature, and to science he devoted himself till he all but killed
the human nature inside him. Science was his religion, the
regulator of his morality. She was the one power over his conduct.' What often was called religion was with him a cold belief,
z

338

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

useful for political purposes, to be kept apart from science, disconnected with morality. The principles of religion ought
not to be discussed; if Faith and Reason come into collision,
Reason must give way. He speaks of science as the handmaid
of religion, not in the sense of waiting upon her in order to explain what is obscure in her teachings and her prophecies, but
as having to succumb if there came a conflict between her and
revelation. Naturally, thus divorcing Faith and Reason, he is
led into inconsistency. He says at one moment that God has
set the world in the heart of man in order that he may find it
o u t ; yet again he says that all human things are full of ingratitude and treachery. At one moment he recognises the divinity
in man ; at another he calls him but a mass of sin and corruption.
His theology sits exceedingly loosely on him. He thinks that
the first principles of theology were laid down by the Church out
of Scripture, but his anxiety that science should not seek support out of Scripture is obvious. At the same time he is careful
to show how impossible it is that learning should make men
atheists, for by its help man can find out the ordinances and
decrees by which God makes the world beautiful and decent, and
thus is eventually taught to regard with faith and awe the supreme
and summary law of nature which cannot be found out. " Men
cannot fly on the waxen wings of the senses " to discover the
secrets of the Deity. Of atheists he has the utmost abhorrence
and contempt. "God," he says, "never wrought miracles to
convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it." " I t
is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism,
but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered,
it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it
beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together,
it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." It is inherent in
man to worship a God. " The most savage of tribes take part
with the subtlest philosophers in the worship of Him." The
causes of atheism he finds in scandal of priests, in profane scoffing, in too much prosperity.
But his theology gives him no directions for daily conduct.
Its practical use is to organise a religion which shall be of service
to the state. Religion must give to a state that internal unity
which its government and its geographical limits represent
externally. Religious unity is peculiar to those peoples who
worship the one, true, and therefore jealous God. The fruits of
unity are externally, freedom from scandal; internally, peace.

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON".

339

The bounds of unity should be defined, not after the fashion of
Jehu, nor after the fashion of the Laodicean, but moderately and
impartially; needless controversies are often caused on petty
points. To Bacon, disunion in religion implied a disunited
England, a helpless prey to foreign despotism and foreign superstition. He held that the differences between High Churchmen
and Puritans should be settled entirely with reference to the
good of the nation. To him it was only on indifferent points
of ceremony and orthodoxy that they differed. Every effort
should be made to bring about peace. " The wrath of man
worketh not the righteousness of God;" and he says in deprecation of the Puritan point of view, " I could never find but that
God hath left the like liberty to church government as he hath
done to civil government, to be varied according to the time,
place, and accidents, which nevertheless his high and divine
Providence doth order and dispose." Why should the civil state
be subject to reform, and the ecclesiastical state receive no alteration ? " A contentious retaining of custom is a turburlent thing."
Yet Bacon is not wholly averse to the Puritans : their tendency
to assimilate the Church to the reformed Churches of Europe
seemed to him to be a means of increasing England's political
influence; it might help the State in founding that great monarchy
of the West which was one of Bacon's political dreams. The
Church, he says, concluding his essay on religious unity, should
be like Christ's coat, which had no seam.
If Bacon is intolerant of atheism as tending to ecclesiastical
and therefore political disunion, he is much more intolerant of
superstition; for superstition was represented to him by the
Church of Rome, the type of all that threatened national
independence and national unity.
It was not to him " a
glorious style of weakness," as to Lord Brooke. His hatred of
Romanism is genuine and intense. What Duessa was in the
Faery Queen is Rome in Bacon's policy; it undermined the theory
of government; it made all systems of policy futile. It has a
fatal effect on the individual. " Superstition does the work of
experience in crime; it impels and hardens men in wrong-doing;"
it is " the reproach of the Deity." It were better even to be an
atheist than a slave to superstition. It is better to have no
opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of
him. It is the foundation of all immorality both in the individual and in the state. But Bacon's ideas of morality and
immorality are peculiar and puzzling, uninfluenced as they are
by any high ideal of conduct or duty. Bacon in the world of

340

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

science had vast and noble ideals : in practical life he had nothing
that could be called an ideal. His treatment of men was regulated entirely with reference to what they were, not at all with
reference to what they ought to be. Machiavelli was Bacon's
guide in practical morality; he applied to individuals the
morality that Machiavelli applied to states. What wonder then
was it, if he had spent all his life in trying to understand the
worst motives of human action, that Bacon at the close of his
days could say " that age doth profit rather in the powers of
the understanding than in the powers of the will and affections."
For Bacon, like Machiavelli, based his action on knowledge of
the worst side of man, ignoring that better side, that belief might
have helped to develop. It is necessary, he says, for a private
individual who is anxious to succeed to harden himself, and to
learn to be good or otherwise according to the exigence of his
affairs. " A tender man, one that desires to be honest in everything, runs a great hazard among so many of a contrary principle,
and this great hazard no successful man would run." Bacon, like
Machiavelli, would, if he had carried his principles to their
extreme, have condemned the Christian religion as encouraging
the self-denying principle, which places the highest good in selfrepression and abnegation. Bacon, like Machiavelli, would have
found himself a pagan, living for the development of the faculties,
eager for happiness and success in this life. But Bacon wanted
the sincerity of Machiavelli. The Christian faith was necessary
to his political Church; he could not afford to deny it in theory,
though his practical morals contradicted its belief. Indeed, he
refused to see that his morality was unchristian ; he refused to
call the " art of advancement in life " an evil art, as Machiavelli
did. He refused frankly to push his theories to their extreme ;
he had the inconsistency of a nature which can be explained as
less frank than that of Machiavelli, but a nature which was
larger and more sensitive, open to more sets of influences. He
says, indeed, " There is in human nature generally more of the
fool than of the wise "; that we must act from our belief in its
foolishness, " not from our belief in its wisdom; we must love
as if we were sometime to hate, and hate as if we were sometime
to love;" but he could never quite crush those yearnings towards
love and affection for human beings, which teach better than
any creeds the principles of forbearance and unselfishness, without
which the world is hollow, faces a gallery of pictures, and talk a
tinkling cymbal. He could never have the cheerful complacency
of the man who had only seen and felt one side ; he had a slight

CHAP. XIV.]

BACOK

341

touch of that bitterness that poisoned the life of the noble egotist
who said there are so many millions in the world mostly fools,
—a bitterness which came not so much from his contempt for
humanity, as from his high idea of what man might be. But
Bacon had no feeling for humanity which can be called love or
enthusiasm; he had a certain pity for mankind which was as
distant from love as it was from scorn. In the De Augmentis
he treats of the reform and amendment of human nature. Custom and habit, he says, are powerful over men's natures, but the
most effectual remedy is " that of electing and propounding into
a man's self good and virtuous ends to his life and actions, such
as may be in a reasonable sort within his compass to attain."
And when we read the essay on Charity, " the affecting of the
weal of men which is what the Grecians call Philanthropia,"
that inclination to goodness which is imprinted deeply in the
nature of man, the highest form of it being to have St. Paul's
perfection, to wish to " b e an anathema from Christ, for the
salvation of his brethren," we see that Bacon had in his heart an
admiration and an understanding of those qualities which are
at the root of the morality of social life. But only vaguely
did he recognise the working of the spirit of self-sacrifice in
actual life. He certainly did not realise that his ideal of a united
Church was efficient and powerful mainly because it made this
principle, that of mutual assistance and self-sacrifice, the bond of
its union. Commonwealths and governments do nourish virtue
grown, he said, but can not inspire i t ; he did not recognise
that one of the greatest inspirations to virtue was "the loving
consciousness of responsible ties." Neither had he that belief in
government which characterises Machiavelli; he did not speak
of one of the duties of government as being that of " constraining
men to love one another."
In youth Bacon wrote, " I have as vast contemplative ends
as I have moderate civil ends." We have seen the nature of the
moderation of these civil ends : howT he gained the whole world,
but lost his own soul.
What can be said of his realisation of " those vast contemplative ends which were the cherished objects of his life 1"
It is supposed that at college Bacon first conceived his profound contempt for the Aristotelian philosophy, but he always
separated his condemnation of the disciples from his opinion of
their master. Aristotle's vast intellect could not fail to extort
admiration from one whose chief intellectual excellence was his
power of grasp and wide comprehension. Indeed, no intellect

342

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

could be less fitted than Bacon's for a lawyer's career, the one
on which Bacon first entered, being called as a barrister in 1582.
In the details of this narrow and technical profession his powers
could not fail to be misunderstood. " Bacon hath great wit and
much learning," said Elizabeth, " b u t in law he showeth to the
uttermost of his knowledge and is not deep." Bacon's opinion
of the legal mind can be gathered from his criticism on the
Attorney-General. " He is one," he says, " who nibbleth solemnly
at knowledge, and distinguisheth but doth not apprehend." He
had always, all his life long, perhaps a too great contempt for
those who made distinctions and had not the power of apprehension, the power of seizing " the similarities of things." He
had, indeed, the defects of his great qualities ; he had that deficiency in exactness of mind and in discrimination of details
which belongs to intellects of the large comprehensive and poetic
type, whose instinct is to see unity in everything and to neglect
differences. He was led thus first to wonder at, then to despise,
and then to subvert, the system of the schoolmen; and, perhaps,
sometimes to underrate the genius of Aristotle, who combined
with his width of intellect that subtlety of discrimination
which was exaggerated by his followers and depreciated by Bacon.
The mechanical part of Aristotle's system had been abused. '' Aristotle's followers had despised that careful examination of nature,
that wise and cautious prudence in the application to particular
phenomena of general formulas, which had distinguished the
work of their master. They thought themselves.to be possessed
of a mode of research which would give infallible correctness in
the results obtained. They left entirely out of sight his prudent
reserve, his great care, in the employment of his method. The
synthetic mode of reasoning is peculiarly susceptible to the corruption that arises from over-subtlety in the vain employment
of words, and various circumstances in the course of time contributed to its degeneration and to its consequent uselessness."
It was used by the acute, disputatious Greek, " the fluent, subtlesensed ; " it was further corrupted by the Jews and the Arabs.
Ultimately additional errors were given to it by the dogmas of
mediaeval Christianity, by that alliance between logic and Church
doctrine in the schools, which limited the human mind on the
one hand by the dogmas of the Church, and on the other by the
so-called dogmas of Aristotle. It prevented free enquiry and
examination of nature, and thus put a stop to progress; it encouraged that tendency to remain stationary, which the Aristotelian philosophy, even in its pure and normal state, had

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

343

shown. Its ultimate aim had always been the attainment of
abstract truth in order to purify and elevate the human faculties.
The investigation of nature was merely a means to carry the
mind towards the contemplation of the supreme Good and Beauty.
Practical utility was never an aim. Thus the aim of ancient
philosophy was entirely different to that of modern philosophy;
consequently the methods of both were different. It was Bacon,
whose mind was essentially utilitarian in the highest sense of the
word, who first clearly exposed the uselessness of the ends aimed
at by scholastic philosophy and substituted for its methods,
methods which would enable the discovery of truth for the benefit
and relief of man's estate. Many before him had attempted to
throw off the yoke of scholasticism, but so intimately connected
was it with with religious orthodoxy, that it was not possible to
do so before the Beformation. Bacon, living in the England of
Elizabeth and James I., at a time and in a country where a
great revolution was possible, put the greatest and finishing
touch to work in which Boger Bacon, Wyclif and his Lollards,
and all who protested against authority, either in philosophy or
religion, had been engaged. Bacon proposed to embody his
system in a series of works called the " Instauratio Magna, or the
Great Institution of True Philosophy." He must have known
that the vast scheme of this great work could evidently not be
accomplished by one man, for every new addition to knowledge
would modify former conclusions; still the method which underlay the whole would remain. I t was to consist first of the
" Partitiones Scientiarum," a summary or classification of knowledge, with indications of those branches which had been imperfectly treated; secondly, of the "Novum Organum," or New
Instrument, an exposition of the methods to be adopted in the
investigation of truth, and indications of the principal sources
of human error, and remedies against that error in future;
thirdly, the " Phenomena Universi," a complete body of wellobserved facts and experiments in all branches of human knowledge to furnish the raw material upon which the method was to
be applied; fourthly, the " Scala Intellectus," rules for the gradual
ascent of the mind from particular instances of phenomena to
principles continually more and more abstract; fifthly, "Prodromi,"
or anticipations of forestallings of the New Philosophy, i.e. truths
provisionally established to be afterwards tested by the New
Method; sixthly, " Philosophia Secunda," the results of the first
careful and complete application of the methods previously laid
down to the vast body of facts to be accumulated and observed,

344

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

in accordance with the rules and precautions' contained in the
second and fourth parts.
This was Bacon's scheme, and he was led to conceive it and
to work for it through that enthusiasm which is the noblest
trait in his character : his object was an endeavour to restore to
its perfect and original condition " the commerce between the
mind of man and the nature of things," a connection more precious to him than anything on earth. He was not a mere
utilitarian in the narrow sense of the term : "Fruit for the life
of man " was certainly the object of Bacon's philosophy, but it
was more than to supply man's wants: it was to discover also
the secret laws of nature. " Truth and utility are the very same
things, and works themselves are of greater value as pledges of
truth than as contributing to the comforts of life."
The first part of his scheme is known to us now as the
Advancement of Learning, published 1605, afterwards altered
and extended and republished in Latin in 1623 as Be Augments Scientiarum. It opens with an address to the King, who
was to be the chief co-operator in this great work, full of slavish
and audacious flattery, characteristic of the age and of Bacon's own
servile attitude towards the great. But much depended on the
King's favour, on the help that he could give; "for I am well
assured the excellence of the King deserves to be expressed not
only in the praise of the present time and the fame of the future,"
but " in some solid work, fixed memorial and immortal monument,
bearing a character or signature both of the power of a king and
the difference and perfection of such a king." This solid
work is to be the "Augmentation of Learning;" and for this end
Bacon says he writes the present treatise in two parts, the first
treating of the excellency of learning and knowledge, and therefore showing the excellency of merit in the propagation thereof;
the second showing what has been done for learning, the defects
of what has been done, " t o the end that though I cannot
positively or affirmatively advise your Majesty, or propound
unto you framed particulars, yet I may excite your princely
cogitations to visit the excellent treasure of your own mind, and
thence to extract particulars for this purpose agreeable to your
magnanimity and wisdom." And first he clears it from the disgraces it has received in the first instance from divines. The
cause of the Fall was the proud knowledge of good and evil
which man aspired to with the intent to give law unto himself and to depend no longer on God's law: it is not quantity
of knowledge but quality of knowledge that is dangerous; and

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

345

the fetters that must be kept on knowledge are just that we
should not so place our felicity in knowledge till we forget our
mortality, that we make application of our knowledge to give
ourselves satisfaction and not distaste and repining, that we
do not presume by contemplation of nature to attain to the
mysteries of God, and, above all, that all our knowledge be
referred to the good of man's estate. " Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become
as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." No bad result can come
from knowledge save by accident; knowledge itself is pleasure,
but when men fall to weakly and wrongly framing conclusions,
then there will be evil results—sense discovers natural things, but
it darkeneth the divine. We must use our sense to discover these
natural things, to apprehend second causes ; it is to reproach the
Divinity to think that his works cannot bear investigation, and
if a man press on far and see the dependence of causes he must
" needs believe that the highest link of nature's chain is tied to
the foot of Jupiter's chair." The objections of Politiques are as
empty as those of divines, and in a passage which is an example
of fulness of thought and conciseness of expression Bacon sums
up their arguments. They,say "learning doth soften men's
minds and makes them more unapt for the honor and exercise
of arms, that it doth mar and pervert men's dispositions for
matter of government and policy in making them too curious
and irresolute by variety of reading, or too peremptory or positive
by strictness of rules and axioms, or too immoderate and overweening by reason of the greatness of examples, or too incompatible and differing from the times by reason of the dissimilitude of examples, or at least that it doth divert men's travails
from action and business and bringeth them to a love of leisure
and privateness, and that it doth bring into states a relaxation
of discipline, whilst every man is more ready to argue than to
obey and execute." But these objections have rather the countenance of gravity than grounds of justice. The authority of
Cato and Socrates cannot countervail the force of those examples
of concurrence in learning and arms which we hear of in Epaminondas the Theban, in Xenophon the Athenian. No government was ever disastrous that was in the hands of learned
governors: Nero in his minority was kept straight by Seneca,
a pedanti; Gordianus by Misitheus, a pedanti: the Popes,
who are learned men, govern better than other rulers. And in
everything " learning ministereth greater strength of medicine or
remedy than it offer eth cause of indisposition or infirmity." And

346

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

he replies in a passage showing equal genius in full and concise
expression to the objections of politiques: " F o r if by a secret
operation it make men perplexed and irresolute, on the other
side by plain precept it teacheth them what things are in their
nature demonstrative and what are conjectural, and as well the
use of distinctions and exceptions as the latitude of principles
and rules. If it mislead by disproportion or dissimilitude of
examples, it teacheth men the force of circumstances, the errors
of comparisons, and all the cautions of application, so that in all
these it doth rectify more effectually than it can pervert."
And, thirdly, the calumny that Learning suffers from learned
men themselves either comes from circumstances which are not
in them and not to their discredit, or is accidental. For instance,
it is cast up against learned men that they are generally poor,
but this ought to be to their credit: see what Machiavelli says
of the Friars, "That the kingdom of the clergy had been long
before at an end, if the reputation and reverence towards the
poverty of the Friars had not borne out the scandal of the superfluities and excesses of bishops and prelates." And by no means
are their employments mean: to them is confided the government of youth, and Bacon, in his anxiety to dignify this profession, uses an argument characteristically far-fetched. I t is said,
" your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall
see visions;" this, according to Bacon, plainly indicating that in
proportion as visions are superior to dreams, so is youth superior to age. Their manners, perhaps, are hardly likely to render
them successful in practical life, but are by no means to their
discredit. Indeed their custom of much reading in books, and
reading perhaps of better times than their own, makes them too
ideal in their views : makes them hard on their own times : " and
learning enduing them with a true sense of the frailty of their
persons, of, the casualty of their fortunes, of the dignity of their
soul and vocation, makes them careless of their behaviour in the
world and to the people of the world; and because the largeness
of their minds can hardly confine itself to dwell on the examination of the nature and customs of an individual, they fail in
applying themselves to one particular person."
But more important, more detrimental to learning than the
objections of divines and politiques, than the poverty, the manners and habits of learned men, are the errors and vanities that
have intervened in the studies of the learned; and first the
study of words not matter which came in with the Renaissance.
Bacon's view of the Renaissance is peculiar, yet interesting, as

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

347

being the narrow view of a contemporary concerning that greatest
of all movements of the civilised world. " Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher providence, but in discourse of
reason finding what a province he had undertaken against the
Bishop of Kome and the degenerate traditions of the Church, and
finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of
his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call
former times to his succours to make a party against the present time : so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in
humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally
to be read and revolved. And thereof grew again a delight in
their manner of style and phrase, and an admiration of that kind
of writing: which was much furthered and precipitated by the
enmity and opposition that the propounders of those primitive
but seeming new opinions had against the schoolmen : who were
generally of the contrary part, and whose writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and
frame new terms of art to express their own sense, and to avoid
circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness,
and lawfulness (as I may call it) of the phrase and word." They
cared merely for the form: they were not like Pygmalion, unsatisfied till spirit was breathed into the pure form. And this,
says Bacon, is the dangerous tendency of humanistic learning:
it is a hindrance to severe study, it offers things which are too
easy a satisfaction to the mind of man. And, again, there is
another real danger to learning, and that is futile learning: and
learning can be futile either in subject or method. Learning
that was useless in subject " did chiefly reign among the schoolmen : who having sharp and strong wits and abundance of leisure
and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the
cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their
persons were shut up in the cells of the monasteries and colleges,
and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of
no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out
unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in
their books . . . cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit." And
the schoolmen's method profited them nothing; for they propose to
themselves problems, and then give, not solutions, not confutations
or confirmations, but distinctions. The strength of a science is
in the relation of all its parts, as strength was with the bundle of
faggots when all were tied together, and weakness when they were
separated; but schoolmen made science weak and futile, because by

348

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

their method, instead of suppressing the smaller sort of objections,
they drew them forward and concentrated their attention upon them.
Of all defects of knowledge, deceit and untruth in the subject-matter is the foulest, destroying the essential form of knowledge. A tendency to deteriorate knowledge is to believe things
on too easy a warrant—ecclesiastical history has much suffered
in this respect; or secondly, to attribute too much belief to the
arts themselves or to the authors of arts, as, for instance, in
astrology and alchemy. Education has sometimes the effect of
rendering the mind servile and credulous; but pupils should
only temporarily suspend their judgment. When they have
received instruction they must revert again to their independent
judgment. Other imperfections which distort knowledge are, too
great belief in antiquity, and distrust that anything further can
be found out by present or future times; and thus knowledge and science tend to become stationary and rigid. Another
obstacle to progress is found in the fact that we have abandoned Philosophia Prima. Philosophia Prima is the highest
of all sciences, containing as its facts axioms which are proper
to all sciences. Without it no progress can be made; for no
discovery can be made upon a flat or level. Also men have too
great adoration for the powers of their own minds : they are too
much " given to tumbling up and down in their own conceits :"
they are impatient of doubt: will not duly suspend their judgment. . When they deliver knowledge it is done in too magisterial
and peremptory a way, it is not ingenuous or faithful. But the
greatest error is the misplacement of the end of knowledge.
" For men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge,
sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite;
sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight;
sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable
them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for
lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account
of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there
were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching
and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable
mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower
of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for profit
and sale; and not a rich store-house for the glory of the Creator
and the relief of man's estate." Lastly, when learning has been
cleared from all false calumny, and the abuses to which it is liable
exposed and explained, what shall be said of its dignity * Its
?

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

349

origin is enough to prove its dignity. All learning is knowledge
acquired, and all knowledge in God is original; in heaven the
angels of knowledge and illumination are placed before the angels
of office and domination. Abel, the shepherd of contemplative
life, was preferred by God to Cain. Moses " was seen in all the
knowledge of the Egyptians." Job was swelling with knowledge.
Solomon says, " The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the
glory of man is to find it out." Our Saviour conferred frequently
with priests and doctors; and by the efforts of that most learned
sect, the Jesuits, much has been done to repair the dignity and
authority of the Eoman See. And there are not wanting human
proofs of its dignity. All who were inventors of new arts and
endowments, etc., were consecrated by the ancients among the
gods themselves; under learned governors nations have always
held the most dignified position; see the times of Trajan,
Hadrian, Antoninus Pius ;—and here opportunity is given for an
elaborate panegyric on Elizabeth. And it nourishes not only
imperial and military virtue, but private and moral virtue; it is
the promoter of that type of mind which tends to progress. " It
disposeth the mind not to be fixed in defects, but capable of
growth." . . . " I t taketh away all levity, temerity, and insolency by copious suggestions of all doubts and difficulties, and
acquainting the mind to balance reasons on both sides, and to
turn back the first offers and conceits of the mind, and to accept
of nothing but examined and tried. It taketh away vain admiration of anything which is the root of all weakness." But, says
Bacon, in concluding this first book,—most characteristic of him
in its thought, in its profound reverence and deep enthusiasm
for knowledge, in its contempt for learning which has no useful
end in view, in its concise style, heavy with thought, bearing
traces of classic influence, in the long quotations from classic
authors, in the long sentences, in the long sustained arguments, the
" contentious writing,"—" I do not pretend, and I know it will be
impossible for me, by any pleading of mine, to reverse thejudgment
either of Esop's cock, that preferred the barley corn before the gem,
or of Midas that judged for plenty, or Paris for beauty and love
against wisdom and power. There are those that prefer custom and
habit before all excellency. These things must continue as they have
been; but so will that also continue whereupon learning hath ever
relied, and which faileth not. Justificata est sapientia a filiis suis."
In the second part of his introduction to his great work he
shows what, so far, has been done for the Advancement of Learning and the defects of the same, giving a classification of all

350

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP, XIV

branches of human knowledge under the two great divisions
—Human Learning and Divine Learning : human learning embracing three great classes—History, Poetry, and Philosophy :
poetry, referring only to the imagination, has a small place assigned to it in importance and space. In its cultivation, Bacon,
living in the prime of Elizabethan literature, can find no deficience,
"for being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth,
without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more
than any other kind." We are indebted to it " for the expressing
of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs. But," he concludes, with a decision which he thinks it needless to explain,
" it is not good to stay too long in the theatre."
Of the great work which he proposed to himself he executed
very little. He wrote only the first part of the Novum Organum,
and in the third division his most complete work was the SUva
Silvarum, or Natural History in Ten Centuries. In the Novum
Organum he lays down the principles of his reform in method.
" Certainly they are quite new: and yet they are copied from
a very ancient model, even the world itself and the nature of
things." They are to supersede reasoning by synthesis: the
mind must not descend downwards from theory to fact, but
must carefully observe phenomena before ascending to general
rules or principles. Bacon shows that the rigidity of scholastic
science comes partly from the fact that the ancients, instead of
following for themselves the method which Aristotle had employed—Viz. the inductive method, the observation of facts—
had misused their energy in quibbling about terms and in formulating the rules of the syllogism: that they had not attacked
the real difficulties which prevented discovery of truth. These
lay in combating the prejudices and infirmities of human nature
that obscure the clear and impartial observation of fact. These
are the prejudices common to the whole human race, prejudices
of nation and race^ those of the age, of religion, of profession,
those which come from the use of terms either not understood
or not agreed upon; the difficulties raised by false philosophy,
all the idols of the human race, which he respectively calls those
of the Tribe, the Cave or Den, the Market-place, and the Theatre.
He would not seriously reject the syllogism, but he saw that in
natural science it was of no use till its terms were defined, and
human ingenuity had wasted itself in the attempt at definition,
because it considered itself justified in disregarding facts altogether, and dwelling among barren subtleties which were of no
use, except as gymnastics for the intellect. The observation of

CHAP. XIV.]

BACOK

351

fact, not the fitting of fact into theory, was the one thing on
which Bacon insisted, and he founds his system on the ordinary
course of reasoning followed by every human being. "But to the
immediate and proper perception of the senses he does not attach
much weight:" therefore he proceeds to supply helps for the
senses. The art of conducting experiments is thus the principal
part of Bacon's method; and when by experiments he has discovered the nature of a fact and its cause, he then proceeds to
consider the ultimate cause of that cause. For instance, if he
wished to investigate the nature of heat, he must ascertain not
only the causes of heat in any one body, but the ultimate cause,
form, or law that produces heat in all bodies. This is the science
of metaphysics (in Bacon's sense of the term), above the science
of physics, which only inquires into efficient causes. Physics
could tell us the cause of heat, that it is a mode of motion; but
metaphysics is the science that deals with final causes, showing
us the nature of motion in itself, how it produces different
phenomena, such as heat, light, generation, corruption, etc. And
last comes Prima Philosophia, the parent and stem of all sciences,
containing not merely " similitudes, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but the same footsteps of nature,
treading or printing upon several subjects or matters." But the
axioms of Prima Philosophia are often no more than mere analogies, suggestive and characteristic of Bacon's poetic mind, which
was for ever seeing the similarities of things, but so wide, so vague,
so general, that they are of no scientific importance; as, for instance, the axiom that the nature of everything is best seen in
its smallest portions is common to physics and politics. If equals
are added to unequals the wholes will be unequal, an axiom of
mathematics and also of justice. That a discord ending immediately in a concord sets off harmony is true both in ethics and in
music. Many of them are but pathetic instances of Bacon's
frantic attempt to realise the unity of nature. He fell into that
danger which he himself recognised, " t h a t tendency of the
human understanding which, of its own nature, is prone to
suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world
than it finds." His conception of the Prima Philosophia but
showed his intense yearning to know those great laws for the
discovery of which his method paved the way; he would have
wished to be a discoverer like Newton, who, " b y connecting
the motions of the planets with the fall of the apple, bound
heaven and earth together in the unity of one simple law of
attraction." What he actually accomplished beyond the great

352

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE, [CHAP. XIV.

stimulus he gave seems small when put into words : " he traced
and formulated the steps of the rightly working mind." Lord
Macaulay, with his illustration of the man and the mince-pies,
tries to show that Bacon's work has been much overrated, that
he simply systematised a process which every ordinary mind
goes through in order to arrive at any conclusion. This Bacon
would not deny : but he distrusted the conclusions of an ordinary
mind left to work by itself: he felt that to genius only was it
given to follow out the ordinary course of reasoning in great
matters with adequate closeness and accuracy, " only a few by
native and genuine force of the mind are able to fall into my
form of interpretation." For those who could not claim genius
he gave a substitute in his " Art of experiments." " Our method
of discovering knowledge is of such a kind that it leaves very
little to keenness and strength of intellect, but almost levels all
intellects and abilities." It made scientific progress possible,
without genius : " the rules of harmony are perhaps useless to
Mozarts and Beethovens, but a statement of such rules is not
only useful to music as a whole, but it opens possibilities of
utility to those to whom harmony is not an instinct."
Lord Macaulay, as he underrates the importance of Bacon's
scientific work, so he overrates the exactness and the learning of
Bacon. Bacon when he wrote the De Augmentis did not know the
discoveries that had been made through Kepler's calculations: he
probably did not know—he certainly took no notice of, Napier's
logarithms, of Archimedes' work in geometry, of Galileo's theory
of the acceleration of falling bodies. Blinded by prejudice to
the use and merits of deductive theory, he could not realise
that a mathematician could dispense with induction.
He
despised what had been done in astronomy : he wished to set on
foot a history of celestial bodies collected from purely inductive observation, without any infusion of dogma.
Still the
mote in Bacon's eye was very small compared to the beam that
he wished to extract from the eye of his generation : that youthful anticipation of his great work, which he published in 1585,
" which with great confidence and a magnificent title I named
the greatest 'book of time,'" did not by its grand title overrate
the subsequent achievement of its author, though it was rather
different from what Bacon imagined it would be : his work was
as useful from a destructive point of view, as it was stimulating from a constructive. If Bacon did not do much himself,
he showed what could be done.
Bacon's scientific work was not appreciated by the age.

CHAP. XIV.]

BACON.

353

James I. said of the Novum Organum, that it was like the peace of
God which passeth understanding. The idea of a college whose
aim should be the advancement of science as a whole, containing
departments at which worked a specialist in each branch, their
work being conducted with reference to the advance of the
whole, was never realised; and yet Bacon, not understanding
that a great revolution could not be wrought, nor a new order of
things established, in one man's lifetime, devoted everything in
order to bring about the practical realisation of his theory.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est qu' une grande vie 1" asks Comte. "La pensee
de la jeunesse accomplie dans F&ge mur." In this sense Bacon's
life was not great. Very sad is the passage in his diary which
he wrote at the end of his life. " Besides my innumerable sins,
I confess before thee that I am debtor to thee for the gracious
talent of thy gifts and graces, which I have neither put into a
napkin, nor put it, as I ought, to exchangers, where it might have
made best profit, but misspent it in things for which I was least
fit: so as I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the
course of my pilgrimage." " Death," says Bacon, " openeth the
door to good fame," but a thinking posterity, though recognising
that Bacon has a great and unique nature which must not be
judged by ordinary standards, though recognising that the
stimulus he gave to science by seeking it, " not arrogantly within
the little cells of human wit, but humbly in the greater world,"
by his method in observation, by his love of truth, and by his
sense of law, was great and unparalleled, must necessarily
regard his practical life as the history of the gradual moral
degradation of a human soul, which became in the end incapable
of great and noble impulse, incapable, too, of that lasting remorse
which can be a power over conduct. As Sir Thomas More
made a noble failure in practical life because his ideals were too
high, and because he possessed no knowledge of the art of advancement in life, so Bacon made a miserable failure, because he had
no ideals, no belief in humanity, and guided his action by an
art of life which was grounded solely on his knowledge of the
worst side of human nature.

2 A

CHAPTER XY.
DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETEY.

DONNE, John, 1573-1631; BROWNE, "William, 1588-1643; WITHER,

George, 1588-1667 ; FLETCHER, Giles, 1588-1623 ; CAREW, Thomas,
1589-1639; HERRICK, Eobert, 1594-1674; HABINGTON, William,
1605-1654; SUCKLING, Sir John, 1608-1642; LOVELACE, Richard,
1618-1658 ; HERBERT, George, 1592-1634 ; CRASHAW, Richard, 16151650 ; YAUGHAN, Henry, 1621-1695.

THE Poetry of the Elizabethan period suffered in the same way as
Dramatic Art from the circumstances of national life—from the
divorce between the serious and artistic interests of society. I t
became fantastic, obscure, dealing with far-fetched thoughts,
out-of-the-way conceits. The brains of the poets of these later
times, like those of the schoolmen of mediseval times, became
locked up in the cells of their own imaginations, and these
imaginations were fed by no robust, wide, or healthy interests.
Prose, on the contrary, increased in dignity of style and weight
of thought: the serious thoughts and ideas that agitated men on
the brink of the great Puritan struggle, their enthusiasm for
freedom and religious independence, found in prose the vehicle
for their expression. The prose of this time was not truly artistic ;
it was not polished, self-controlled, and restrained, as it was when
the eighteenth century had inflicted its severe discipline on the
English mind ; but it was eloquent, full of the enthusiasm of deep
feeling, and lighted up,occasionally by flashes of that true poetic
vision which was the inheritance even of the degenerate Elizabethan. Its faults were those of over-elaboration, reminding one
of too much straining after " the witty quaintness" of Lyly
and Sidney : sometimes it was cumbered with images and metaphors, sometimes clumsy and strained with excess of matter.
But it rarely displayed the fatal faults of emptiness or artificiality.
These qualities, together with the advantages that sometimes go

GHAP. xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

355

with them, grace and charm and refinement, were the characteristics of a declining school of poetic art.
Dr. Johnson has given to that school, which embraces the
poets of the decline, the name of Metaphysical, because, as Hallam
says, " they labored after conceits or novel turns of thought,
usually false, and resting on some equivocation of language or
exceedingly remote analogy." They are poets who for delicacy
of genius and facility and grace of expression .have few equals
in any period of our literature. But with the exception of their
rural poetry, all their work is marked by the slenderer genius
that pursues ingenuities and refinements of thought. Contrast
the simplicity and directness of a sonnet of Sylvester's with one
addressed by Browne to his mistress—
" Were I as base as is the lowly plain,
And you, my love, as fyigh as heaven above,
Yet should the thoughts of me, your humble swain,
Ascend to heaven in honor of my love.
Were I as high as heaven above the plain,
And you, my love, as humble and as low
As are the deepest bottoms of the main,
Wheresoe'er you were, with you my love should go.
Were you the earth, dear love, and I the skies,
My love should shine on you like to the sun,
And look upon you with ten thousand eyes,
Till heaven waxed blind, and till the world were done.
Wheresoe'er I am, below, or else above you,
Wheresoe'er you are, my heart shall truly love you."

In the following sonnet, the feeling, though it may be as sincere
as Sylvester's bids fair to become entangled and lose itself in
subtlety—
" Fairest, when by the rules of palmistry
You took my hand to try if you could guess
By lines therein, if any wight there be
Ordained to make me know some happiness,
I wished that those characters could explain
Whom I will never wrong with hope to win,
Or that by them a copy might be seen
By you, 0 love, what thoughts I had within.
But since the hand of nature did not set
(As providently loth to have it known)
The means to find that hidden alphabet,
Mine eyes shall be the interpreters alone.
By them conceive my thoughts, and tell me, fair,
If now you see her that doth love me there."

DONNE was the most obscure and fanciful of the metaphysical

poets.

Mr. Hales says, " His chief interest is that he was the

356

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETKY.

[CHAP. XV.

principal founder of a school which especially expressed and
represented a certain bad taste of his day. Of his genius there
can be no question, but it was perversely directed." In Donne,
too, we find hints of that weariness and depression of life which
was another characteristic of the decline of true art, a reaction
against the intense energy and vital exuberance of the earlier
time. I t mixes with the spirit of his love-songs—
" Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me ;
But since that I
Must die at last, 'tis best
Thus to use myself in jest,
By feigned deaths to die.
"Yesternight the sun went hence
And yet is here to-day,
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way ;
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Hastier journeys since I take
More wings and spurs than he.
" 0 how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot ado another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall !
But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us t' advance."

Some of the best and most powerful of the love-songs are those
of Herrick.

HEREICK was the most vigorous and most versatile

poet of his school. Among pastoral writers he was one of the
most famous as a lyrist; he is scarcely excelled except by Shelley.
Some of his lyrics have the force and the passion which belongs
to earlier days, as, for instance, the song to Anthea—
" Bid me to live and I will live
Thy Protestant to be ;
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.
" A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
A heart as sound and free
As in the whole world thou canst find,
That heart I'll give to thee.

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

357

"Bid that heart stay, and it will stay
To honor thy decree ;
Or bid it languish quite away,
And 't shall do so for thee.
" Bid me to weep, and I will weep
While I have eyes to see ;
And having none, yet I will keep
A heart to weep for thee.
Bid me despair, and I'll despair
Under that cypress tree ;
Or bid me die, and I will dare
E'en death to die for thee.
" Thou art my life, my love, my heart
The very eyes of me ;
And hast command of every part,
To live and die for thee."

The love-poems of RICHARD LOVELACE have a certain nobility
of feeling which distinguishes them from the generality of those
of this school, which are written in a rather morbid self-centered
spirit. The song " to Althea," from prison, ending—
" Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage ;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty;"—

the song to his love, " On going to the Wars " >
—
"Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To wars and arms I fly.
"True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field,
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
" Y e t this inconstancy is such
As you, too, shall adore ;
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more,"—

both express a freer healthier spirit than is usual with the
fantastic school. There are also love-poems written in a spirit

358

RECLINE OE ELIZABETHAN POETRY,

[CHAP. XV.

of reaction. To SUCKLING t h e lover presents himself in a light
not altogether solemn and pathetic. H e is impatient with h i m —
' * Why so pale and wan, fond lover ?
Prithee, why so pale ?
"Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail ?
Prithee, why so pale ?
" W h y so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prithee, why so mute ?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do it ?
Prithee, why so mute ?"
Suckling is also
of love—

flippant.

H e is impatient with the constancy

" Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together,
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.
" H a d it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this,
A dozen dozen in her place."
Surely such a flippant and impatient treatment of a state
mind, whose least symptoms h a d been honoured a n d dignified
t h e conventions and traditions of ages, announced t h e coming
revolutionary times.
T h e best poem inspired b y t h e reactionary spirit is t h a t
G E O E G E W I T H E R , " t h e Author's Resolution," in a sonnet-—
"Shall I wasting in despair
Die, because a woman's fair ?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Cause another's rosy are ?
Be she fairer than the day
Or the flowery meads in May,
If she think not well of me,
What care I how fair she be ?
"Shall my silly heart be pin'd
Cause I see a woman kind,
Or a well-disposed nature
Joined with a lovely feature.
Be she meeker, kinder than
Turtle-dove or pelican,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how kind she be.

of
by
of
of

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

859

" Shall a woman's virtues move
Me to perish for her love ?
Or her well deservings known
Make me quite forget mine own ?
Be she with that goodness blest
Which may merit name of best;
If she be not such to me,
What care I how good she be.
" Cause her fortune seems too high,
Shall I play the fool and die ?
She that bears a noble mind,
If not outward helps she find,
Thinks what with them he would do
That without them dares her woo,
And unless that mind I see,
What care I how great she be.
"Great or good or kind or fair,
I will ne'er the more despair ;
If she love me (this believe),
I will die ere she shall grieve.
If she slight me when I woo
I can scorn and let her go,
For if she be not for me,
What care I for whom she be."

Herrick's pastorals mark an important epoch in the history
of pastoral poetry. The pastoral existed in its original simplicity as the poetry of rural life among the Sicilians; but, following
the great authority of Virgil, Petrarch and Sannazaro in Italy,
Guarini in Spain, Spenser, Beaumont, and Fletcher in England,
had all sought in it merely an artificial sphere in which their art
could disport itself. They were not animated by that strong
feeling for nature, that worship for her, as the inspiration of
what is purest, most natural and most ideal in life, which alone
justifies any artist in treating the pastoral, and which makes
Wordsworth the greatest pastoral poet we possess. Spenser, in
his Shepherd's Calendar, had used the pastoral as a vehicle
for satire against the corruption of the times. He had thus
followed the example of Baptista Mantuanus and his English
imitator Alexander Barclay, who first used it as a means for
moral satire. Gradually the old spirit which had at first
animated it became quite dead. Ben Jonson in England first
endeavoured to put into it some vigorous element by connecting
it with national legend, but it was these poets of the metaphysical school, Herrick, Browne, and Wither, who first infused
it with that spirit which alone can make it a branch of a r t : they

360

i DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

[CHAP. XV.

were the first in England to understand what the proper sphere
of the pastoral is.
And it was not unnatural that at this time of decline the
pastoral should make a new step forward. For the very fundamental cause of the decline of art was the separation of art and
national life. Art was driven back to feed upon itself : it became
either fantastic and subtly ingenious, or it became degraded
by dealing with the facts of an unhealthy and degenerate court
life, as in the drama, or it sought this sphere in which it still
might be fresh and real. Its banishment from actual practical
life gave it opportunities for an uninterrupted worship of nature,
the opportunity for drinking in and acting on its inspiration,
untroubled by the interests of a complex human life. The
poetry of Herrick was the first anticipation of the spirit that
animates Wordsworth's poems. He and his contemporaries,
"Wither and Browne, were the first in a series of poets,—including
later, after the chilling influence of the eighteenth century had
passed away, Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Coleridge,—all of whom
understand, more or less, the real spirit of nature, after which
the unfortunate pastoral had for so long unsuccessfully groped.
Twenty years of Arcadian* seclusion in Devonshire prepared
Herrick for the writing of his Hesperides. "There is not a
sunnier book in the world than the Hesperides" says Mr. Gosse :
" to open it is to enter a rich garden on a summer afternoon,
and to smell the perfume of a wealth of flowers and warm herbs
and ripening fruits. The poet sings in short flights of songs of
all that makes life gay and luxurious, of the freshness of a dewy
field, of the fecundity and heat of harvest, of the odour and
quietude of an autumn orchard." " I sing," says Herrick, in
" t h e Argument of the Hesperides"
"Of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July-flowers ;
I sing of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes ;
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness ;
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris ;
I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white ;
I write of groves, of Twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab and of the Fairy king ;
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall,
Of Heaven—and hope to have it after all."

His song to the Daffodils is one of the most charming that

CHAP, xv.]

DECLIKE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

361

he has written. There is, however, a slight touch of pathos in
it which does not allow it to be taken as characteristic of his
rural poetry, which is perfectly fresh and free from repining—
" Eair Daffodils we weep to see
You haste away so soon,
As yet the early rising sun
Hath not attained his noon ;
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song ;
And, having pray'd together, we
"Will go with you along.
" "We have short time to stay as you ;
We have as short a spring ;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer's rain ;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again."

Browne and Wither also understood the true spirit of the
pastoral. Wither had " a beautiful soul" and an artistic temperament, but he early threw himself into a life of politics, and,
as Mr. W. J. Arnold says, "his nature was not large enough to
pour itself with equal power into the two channels of art and
practical life." Later, like all the deeper and more thinking
spirits of the time, he became a strict Puritan: that delight in
nature, that enthusiasm for life and its interests and beauties,
which had inspired his poems seemed to him to be wrong, to be
dangerous trifling with the seriousness of existence.
The BritannicCs Pastorals of BROWNE were honoured with
some charming commendatory verses by Drayton. " H e is less
unreal," says Mr. Arnold, " than almost any other English poet
who chose the pastoral as his sphere, though sometimes his
attempts to keep up the conventional pastoral illusion are of a
desperate character, as, for instance, where he addresses his readers
as * swains.'" He had a true enthusiasm for his native country,
for his native streams, for
"Tavy's voiceful stream, to whom I owe
More strains than from my pipe can ever flow."
He never, like Wither, regretted a youth which he had spent
amidst outdoor sights and influences-—

362

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

[CHAP. XV.

'' Nor could I wish those golden hours unspent
Wherein my fancy led me to the woods
And tuned soft lays of rural merriment
Of shepherd's love and never-resting floods."
He has a genuine delight in country sights and sounds which
makes his poetry exceedingly pleasing, though he did not quite
succeed in overcoming the difficulties of the pastoral. The passages which please most in his poetry are the description of
simple rural sights—
" a nimble squirrel from the wood,
Ranging the hedges for his filbert-food,
Sits pertly on a bough his brown nuts cracking ;"
the song of Celadyne when his love is gone—
"So shuts the marigold her leaves
At the departure of the sun ;
So from the honey-suckle sheaves
The bee goes when the day is done ;
So sits the turtle when she is but one,
And so all woe, as I, since she is gone."
" Henceforth," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, " we find a countrypoetry set over against a town-poetry, a poetry of nature set
over against a poetry of man." The finest work of this kind
was yet to be done by Milton, and his secretary, Andrew Marvel],
men who represent no age or school, standing between the declining Elizabethan age and that age of reaction which ultimately
produced the finished artists of the eighteenth century.
Browne had the most profound admiration for Spenser—
"Divinest Spenser, heaven-bred, happy muse !
Would any power into my brain infuse
Thy worth, or all that poets had before,
I could not praise till thou deservest no more."
And this admiration connects him with a section of the metaphysical school who are known as the Spenserians.
Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, Henry More, John Chalkhill, all spoke of Spenser as their master. In this period the
merits of Chaucer were quite eclipsed by those of Spenser.
Naturally to all temperaments of a Puritan and serious turn
Spenser would, be most congenial, and this school in all it
wrote showed a serious and didactic spirit, a desire to deal
with the more serious interests of life. The Purple Island by

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY,

363

Phineas Fletcher is simply a lecture on anatomy, the artist
becoming almost lost in the moralist.
His brother, GILES
FLETCHER, is best known by his religious poems. He writes with
enthusiasm of " Christ's Victory in Heaven," " Christ's Victory
on Earth." Like all poets of this school he uses his imagination
not to create but to decorate. He specially succeeded in close
imitation of his master.
" Before this cursed throng goes Ignorance,
That needs will lead the way he cannot see,
And after all Death doth his flag advance,
And in the midst strife still would roguing be,
Whose ragged flesh and clothes did well agree :
And round ahout amazed horror flies,
And over all shame veils his guilty eyes,
And underneath Hell's hungry throat still yawning lies."
Some of the most beautiful of the poetry of this declining
age is found in the religious writings. Herbert, Herrick, Vaughan,
Habington, Crashaw, Wither, were all animated by that religious
fervour which is distinct from the Puritan because it deals not
so much with the definite creeds that stimulate right action
as with those mystic spiritual longings which seek to leave
earth and to find in emotional life a heaven for the soul. There
is about these religious poets a sort of wildness, a restless excitement, a blind craving for satisfaction, a revolt against that faith
of despair which Webster puts into the mouth of Bosola in the
Duchess of Malfi. " Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage * Such
?
is the soul in the body : the world is like her little turf of grass :
and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives
us as miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison."
This restlessness, this craving of the soul, gives a sort of pathos
to their tone. Eeligion is great because it alone can give rest
and satisfaction.
" Leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not: forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands
"Which petty thoughts have made; and make to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw
And be thy law
"While thou didst wink and would'st not see.
Away ! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there, tie up thy fears ;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load;

364

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

[CHAP. xv>

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling * Child,'
And I replied 'My Lord.' "
The restlessness of personal aspiration is still more visible in
the Litany of Herrick : —
" In the hour of my distress,
"When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet spirit, comfort me.
" "When I lie within my bed,
Sick in heart and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet spirit, comfort me.
When, God knows, I'm tost about
Either with despair or doubt ;
Yet before the glass be out,
Sweet spirit, comfort me."
In the poems of Vaughan, Habington, and Crashaw there
are, indeed, traces of the same fervent heart-searching spirit;
but HABINGTON, who was a fervent and orthodox Catholic* wrote
poems filled with the calm of a deep and poetic mysticism.
" When I survey the bright
Celestial sphere,
So rich with jewels hung, that night
Doth like an Ethiop bride appear,
" My soul her wings doth spread
And heaven-ward flies,
The Almighty's mysteries to read
In the large volumes of the skies.
" Eor the bright firmament
Shoots forth no flame
So silent, but is eloquent
In speaking the Creator's name."
Equally beautiful are some of the poems of VAUGHAN, also
calmer and quieter expressions of a soul longing for the spiritual
life.
" They are all gone into the world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here ;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

365

" I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days ;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmerings and decays.
" Dear beauteous death ! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark ;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark.
" And yet as angels in some brighter dreams'
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep :
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep."—Beyond the Veil.
A little poem on The World is written in the same tone—
" I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov'd."
And CEASHAW, in his lines to St. Theresa, expresses with
equal beauty and feeling, but with greater excitement, the intensity and purity of religious longings—
" 0 thou undaunted daughter of desires !
By all thy dower of lights and fires ;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove ;
By all thy lives and deaths of love ;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire ;
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seiz'd thy parting soul, and seal'd thee his ;
By all the Heaven thou hast in him
(Fair sister of the seraphim !)
By all of him we have in thee ;
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die."—The Flaming Heart.
We find, indeed, among the writings of the metaphysical
school gleams of the purest poetry, flashes of the old Elizabethan
spirit, invigorating with its freshness the rural poetry of Herrick
and of Browne, giving glow and passion to their mystic religious
yearnings. But its spirit was not fundamentally healthy: it

366

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

[CHAP. XV.

was undoubtedly the poetry of decadence. I t was animated not
by that real originality whose only true nourishment is that
deep interest in life which is continually seeing new aspects of
it, and making to itself new imaginative illusions, but by the
desire to run in subtle and obscure currents of thought, to strike
as novel and fresh, by saying the thing which is least obvious
and least expected. There was no health, either moral or artistic,
in a school one of whose chief ornaments, Crashaw, could find
delight in that conceit which describes the' miracle of Cana of
Galilee—
(t
The modest water saw its God and blushed."
The conceits, the imagery, the metaphors which became in time
the soul and substance of poetry were but the ornaments of a
prose which was the expression of the serious and solemn sides
of life. Thus it is that the prose of this time flourished. It
had a certain artistic life peculiar to itself; it was not the pure
polished prose of the times after the Renaissance, but it was
earnest, eloquent, impassioned prose. It had, indeed, very often
the defects of its qualities: it was heavy, involved, and cumbrous;
its writers lacked the dignified and stately eloquence of Hooker,
or the epigrammatic terseness of Bacon, but on the whole they
write pleasingly and artistically, always conscious of a meaning which they never allowed an elaborate style altogether to
crush.
"The interest in individual life, which," as Mr. Stopford
Brooke says, "now began to arise, and which soon took the form
of biography," found expression in the works of Sir J. Overbury,
of John Earle, and Joseph Hall. Thomas Fuller gave a further
stimulus to the literature of biography in his Worthies of England. The historical literature of the period, begun by More,
continued by the dull but respected Stow and Holinshed, contributed to by Raleigh and Bacon, was carried on by Fuller in
his Church History of Britain.
Sir Thomas Browne's Religio
Medici and his Pseudodoxia deal with miscellaneous subjects
of interest in a diffuse, quaint, and fantastic style. But the
book most characteristic of the times is The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton. Analysis of emotion is characteristic of a
declining age, and that the emotion so analysed should be that
of melancholy is but a further proof of that reaction which had
set in against the exuberant and enjoying age of Elizabeth.
The passion and strong emotion of that age had ever been of
near kinship to madness. What wonder then that many of the,

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OE ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

367

succeeding generation should suffer both physically and mentally
from the overstrain of excitement.
The author himself was
subject to melancholy, and gives this as the reason for writing
his large and learned treatise, which deals with the causes, the
cures, and the symptoms. He finds abundant satisfaction for
his scholarly tastes in quotations and allusions to the works of
those numerous authors to whose study he had devoted himself.
Passionless, pedantic, and cold as his treatment of the whole
subject is, his style yet recalls that great age, which, overflowing
with thought and feeling, delighted in dilatation, in piling up
the words, and lengthening out the clauses to intensify the
thought. " Melancholy," he says, " the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition is that
transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small
occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion,
or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or
thought which causeth anguish, dulness, heaviness, and vexation
of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight,
causing frowardness in us, or of dislike. In which equivocal
and improper sense we call him melancholy that is sad, dull,
sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.
And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no
stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous,
so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed,
but more or less, some time or other more or less he feels the
smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality. ' Man that is born of woman is of short continuance and
full of trouble.' Zeno, Cato, Socrates himself, whom Elian so
highly commends for a moderate temper, that ' nothing could
disturb him/ but going out and coming in, still Socrates kept
the same serenity of countenance, what misery soever befel him
(if we may believe Plato, his disciple), was much tormented with
it. . . . Even in the midst of laughing there is sorrow (as
Solomon holds). . . . And it is most absurd and ridiculous for
any mortal man to look for a perpetual tenure of happiness in
this life."
Very similar, energetic, diffuse, overcrowded with words, is
the vindictive style of Milton. Milton thus alludes to his
enemies : "They shall be thrown eternally into the darkest and
deepest gulf of hell, where, under the despiteful control, the
trample and spurn of all the other damned, that in the anguish
of their torture shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving
and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they

368

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

[CHAP. XV.

shall remain in that plight, for ever the basest, the lowermost,
the most dejected, most underfoot, and down-trodded vassals of
superstition."
The prose of Jeremy Taylor belongs to the same age, but it is
refined and softened by that interest in life and men which is
sympathetic, not merely analytic as in the case of Burton, or
fired by intolerance as in the case of Milton. It is thus that
Jeremy Taylor warns his congregation against the gradual
advance of sin. " I have seen the little pearls of a spring sweat
through the bottom of a bank, and intenerate the stubborn
pavement till it hath made it fit for the impression of a child's
foot; and it was despised, like the descending pearls of a misty
morning, till it had opened its way and made a stream large
enough to carry away the ruins of the undermined strand and to
invade the neighbouring gardens; but then the despised drops
were grown into an artificial river and an intolerable mischief.
So are the entrances of sin." And he encourages them to aspire
and to hope. " For so I have seen a lark rising from his bed of
grass and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get
to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was
beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his
motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every
breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and
frequent weighing of its wings, till the little creature was forced
to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and then
it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it had
learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes
through the air about his ministries here below."
Jeremy Taylor, born 1613, dying 1667, lived and wrote long
after the Elizabethan period may be said to have closed ; but the
sweet quaintness of his style, his longing for imagery, his desire
to expand and dilate his subject, connect him with the Elizabethans. He differs from them in that these qualities are controlled by a fine artistic instinct.
After the Eestoration begins that age to which exuberant
and metaphysical style was as hateful as impassioned and intense
feeling. Prose, as well as poetry, was polished and chastened
till it became the artistic expression of all that was proper and
elegant and perspicuous in life and thought. A standard of
propriety, borrowed from the French, taught to the English the
hard lesson of artistic self-control, and the English mind never
appeared to worse advantage than while trying to measure its
thought and expression by the standard of propriety. But in its

CHAP, xv.]

DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

369

superficiality and conventionality, in the dangerous barrenness of
deep motive and feeling which it attempted to inculcate, we see
but the necessary reaction of growth against the Elizabethan
life, which displayed all the coarseness and barbarity which is
bred in the best natures by utter want of self-restraint. We
regard the eighteenth century but as a necessary and painful
time of training and probation in the school of self-criticism and
of self-control.
Self-control of all kinds was becoming so
necessary, life grew continually more and more complex, its
interests more complicated. The political struggle was not in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the comparatively crude
one of the days of Elizabeth, when every man was either an
enemy or a friend, when the external struggle was for national
independence or national slavery, the internal one for freedom
of conscience or subjection to Home. Political and religious
literature did not now mainly consist of pamphlets of invective
against the opposing side. A vast system of alliances, counteralliances, denoting connection with the various interests of
different states, marked the complicated state of foreign policy.
Political life at home was carried on by parties, and there were
ministers who, like Halifax, had a mind large enough to understand and deal with conflicting interests. Philosophy came
definitely into the realm of political and social life. The political
speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke discredited
opinions which could only recommend themselves by the
strength of their invective. To succeed in such a life man must
be many-sided in thought, self-controlled in expression and
action.
As the oppressive yoke of Middle-Age ideas was removed by
the Eenaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so that of
the eighteenth century was cast off by the Eenaissance at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In the first Renaissance men had awoke to the sense of the glory
and beauty of the individual life : in the second Renaissance
awoke the enthusiasm for the collective life of mankind, a belief
in the divinity and perfectibility of the human race, a care for
its present, and a hope for its future. The idea of progress
began to give shape and order to social thought and speculation, and to inspire art with hopefulness. To Godwin and
Shelley its ideals were near and soon to be realised. In later
thought and art, though it lives no less strongly and vividly, yet
the hope it gives is restrained by the sense of slowly-working
laws.
2B

370

DECLINE OE ELIZABETHAN POETKY.

[CHAP. XV.

These two Renaissances, and the art which is the expression
of their life, mark but phases in the "great world-struggle of
developing thought." It may be that there are many yet to
come, and that the soul of man will vibrate ever more and more
strongly and harmoniously " to the larger sweep of the world's
forces."

IND EX.
Ally on Knight, 143.
CHAPMAN, George, 129; his Cozsar
Apologie for Poetrie, the, by Sir
and Pompey, 290; Bussy d'Ambois,
Philip Sidney, 81-85.
291; Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois,
293; Biron's Conspiracy, 294.
Appius and Virginia, 146.
Art, the beginnings of, 56; Elizabethan, j Chaucer, 56, 57.
113 ; decline of, 133.
Chettle's tragedy of Hoffmann, 169 ;
Ascham, Roger, his Toxophilus, 45 ;
on Shakspere's acting, 198.
on educating the young, 46 ; quotes I Colet, John, 12 ; influence of SavonaLady Jane Grey, 47 ; on severity
rola's teaching, 13 ; efforts for reliin training a child, 48 ; necessity
gious reform, 17 ; and ecclesiastical
for discipline, 49-51 ; the Englishcustom, 19 ; founds St. Paul's
man Italianated, 51 ; ready way of
School, 4 1 ; his ' Introduction to
learning Latin, 52, 53.
Lilly's Grammar, 42.
Company of Courtly Makers, the, 57;
honour and devotion to women, 58;
BACON, Francis, 6; the Device, 329;
imitation of Petrarch, 59.
diplomatic talent, 330 ; great object
in life, 333 ; friendship for Essex, Constable, 68.
333; cases of bribery, 336; his Craik, Mr., on the dramatic power of
Essays, 337 ; hatred of the Church
Beaumont and Fletcher, 282.
of Rome, 339; Advancement of Crashaw, Richard, 363; lines on St.
Learning, 344; the Novum OrTheresa, 365.
ganum, 350; Art of Experiments,
352.
DANIEL'S Sonnets to Delia, 121; History of the Civil Wars, 129.
Bale's King John, 144.
Davies, Sir John, his Nosce Teipsum,
Barnfield, 117.
133.
Beaumont and Fletcher, 258 ; their
dramatic partnership, 260; Thierry Dekker, Thomas, 300; his Fortunatus, 301.
and Theodoret, 273 ; Philaster,
274; the Maid's Tragedy, 276 ; Donne, John, 355.
Knight of the Burning Pestle, 280. Dowden, Prof., on Titus Andronims,
204; the character of Julia, 207 ;
Boccaccio, 6.
definition of comedy and tragedy,
Brooke, Lord, his tragedy of Mustapha,
216.
132 ; Human Learning, 133.
Drama, the, rise of, 135; the three
Browne, Sir Thomas, 366.
requisites of, 136; mystery plays,
Browne, William, 355; his Britannia's
137 ; stage - externals, 138 ; the
Pastorals, 361.
Globe Theatre, 139; masques and
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 366.

372

i r o>EX.

pageants, 140; literary allegory, i Gammar Gurtoris Needle, 150.
141; the moralities, 142 ; influence Gascoigne, George, 69.
of Italian models, 143, 147; of Gorboduc, or Porrex and Ferrex, 146.
Seneca, 146 ; national themes, 148; Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Invention,
development of comedy, 148; de- 117.
cline of the, 284.
Gosse's criticism of Lodge's writings,
Drayton, Michael, 128.
118,119.
Drummond's sonnets, 121, 122.
Gosson, Stephen, his Schoole of Abuse,
Dryden's opinion of Shakspere's writ82.
ings, 201.
Gower's chivalry, 59.
Dyer, Sir Edward, 132.
Greene's lyric poetry, 119 ; on content, 132 ; his miserable death, 158,
EDWAEDES' Damon and Pythias, 145,
Looking-Glass for London and Eng147.
land, 166 ; Orlando Furioso, 168 ;
Elizabethan Thought in Keligion, 312;
Alphonsus, King of Aragon, Georgein Science, 327 ; Poetry, decline of, j d-Greene, and Friar Bacon and
!
354.
Friar Bungay, 168; attack on
England's Helicon, 117.
Shakspere in the Groatsworth of
Erasmus, 6 ; a prominent disciple of
Wit, 197.
the New Learning, 1 9 ; his Adagia, Greville, Fulke, 132. See Lord Brooke.
20 ; the Enchiridion and Praise of Grey, Lady Jane, her education, 47.
Folly, 20 ; on Pope Julius II., 22 ; Grimald, 65.
The Christian Prince, 2 3 ; on the
system of flogging in schools, 4 2 ; HABINGTON, William, 363, 364.
the qualifications of a schoolmaster, Hagenbach on the drama, 137.
43.
I Handful of Pleasant Delights, A, 117.
Essex, Earl of, his friendship for Bacon, Harrington, Sir John, on Puttenham
333; trial, 334.
and Sir Philip Sidney, 81.
Euphuism, 70.
Harvey, Gabriel, 66 ; influence of his
friendship on Edmund Spenser, 88FAUST, legend of, 1.
90.
Ficino, Marsilio, 12.
Herbert, George, 363.
Fletcher, Giles, his religious poems, I Herrick, Kobert, 356 ; his pastorals,
363.
J 359; Hesperides, 360 ; the DaffoJohn, his musical lyrics,
dils, 361 ; Litany, 364.
120; dedication to the Faithful Hey wood, John, his Four P^s, 148.
Shepherdess, 145 ; partnership with
Thomas, 295; the Brazen,
Beaumont, 262; Wild Goose Chase, Golden, and Silver Age, 296 ; The
262, 269; compared with Shelley,
Challenge for Beauty, 297; The
263 ; Nice Valour, 265 ; The Loyal
Woman killed with Kindness, 297.
Subject, 265; the Elder Brother, Hooker, Kichard, 312 ; importance of
266; The Custom of the Country,
his work, 313 ; Ecclesiastical Polity,
266; Bonduca, 266; The Spanish
314-326.
Curate, 268; The Pilgrim, 268; Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, his
The Faithful Shepherdess, 269-273.
sonnets, 61 ; his poem on the death
Phineas, his Purple Island,
of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 63.
362.
Hughes, T., his Misfortunes of Arthur,
Flogging, the system of, in schools,
148.
42.
j
Ford's Broken Heart, 307; Perkin \ INGELEND, Thomas, his comedy of the
Warbeck, 308.
I Disobedient Child, 149.
Fuller, Thomas, his Worthies of Eng-1 Italy, Kenaissance in, 3-5 ; influence
land, 366.
| on England, 7.

>EX.

373

JAMES I. forbids the profane use of
187 ; Dr. Faustus, 187-191; his
sacred names on the stage, 288.
services to dramatic literature, 191 ;
Jameson, Mrs., on Shakspere's charcompared with Shakspere, 192acter of Cleopatra, 228.
194.
Jonson, Ben, 232 ; his personality and Marston, John, 301.
powers, 233 ; education, 234 ; mar- Massinger, Philip, his Virgin Martyr,
riage, 234; devotion to the Court,
307.
235 ; Ode to Himself, 236 ; admir- Meres, his Palladis Tamia, 169.
ing criticism of Shakspere, 237 ; his Middle Ages, the, 2, 3.
great ideal, 238; the symbolism Middleton's Game of Chess, 288, 298 ;
of his masks, 239 ; Sejanus, 240his witches compared with Shak243 ; ^Catiline, . 243 ; Every Man
spere's, 298.
in his '• Humour, 244 ; Every Man Milton's prose style, 367.
out of his Humour, 245 ; The Case More, Sir Thomas, 25 ; early promise,
is Altered, 246 ; Cynthia's Revels,
25 ; member of Parliament, 26 ; his
247; The Poetaster, 248; comedies,
asceticism, 26 ; marriage, 27 ; em250; The Alchemist, 250 ; Volpone,
bassy to the Netherlands, 2 8 ;
251; Epicoene, 2 5 1 ; Bartholomew
Utopia, 29; martyrdom, 29.
Fair, 251 ; The New Inn, Mag- Munday, 169.
netic Lady, and The Tale of a Tub,
252 ; The Bad Shepherd, 253- NASH, Thomas, his dramas, 169.
255.
Naunton, Sir Robert, his Fragmenta
Regalia, 72.
KIRKE, Edward, his preface to the New Learning, the School of, 10 ; its
Shepherd's Calendar, 88, 98.
work in religion, 1 1 ; in Social and
Kyd, Thomas, his Spanish Tragedy,
Political Criticism, 25 ; in Educa160-163.
tion, 41-45.
Newe Custom, 142.
LATIMER'S Sermon of the Ploughers, Norton, Thomas, 146.
54, 55.
Lessing on the method of criticism, Paradise of Dainty Devices, 117.
202.
Passionate Pilgrim, The, 117.
Lodge's Rosalynde, 118 ; The Wounds Peele, George, 127-; his Arraignment
of Civil War, 169.
, of Paris, 163 ; Sir Clyomen and
Lovelace, Richard, 357.
j Sir Clamydes, 164; Battle of
Alcazar, 164 ; David and Bethsdbe,
Luther, 11.
165.
Lyly, John, 75; his Euphues, 77;
second book of Euphues, 80; his Pepys' criticism on Shakspere, 201.
lyric in Alexander and Campaspe, Perverse Doctrine, 142.
118; classical knowledge, 153 ; Petrarch, 5 ; his 300 sonnets to Laura,
60.
Woman in the Moon, 154 ; Midas,
154; Endymion, 154, 155; Sapho Poetical Rhapsody, A, 118.
and JPhao, 155; Campaspe, 156, Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, 286.
166.
i Puttenham's Art of English Poetrie,
Lyrics, writers of, 117.
81.
I RALEIGH, Sir Walter, his friendship
for Spenser, 94; reply to Marlowe's
Marlowe's contribution to Hero and
pastoral song, 130 ; The Lie, 131.
Leander, 116, 173 ; his lyrical
power, 119 ; Tamburlaine, 174-176; \ Renaissance, History of, 1 ; in Italy,
The Jew of Malta, 177-181;
3 ; Petrarch its grandest repreEdward II., 181-187 ; Massacre of\ sentative, 5 ; second great period
Paris, 187; Dido of Carthage, \ 6 ; third age, 6.

MACHIAVELLI, 23.

374

INI
DEX.

SACKVILLE, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst,
68 ; his Mirror for Magistrates,
69.
Savonarola, 1 2 ; his influence, 13.
Sliakspere's love poems, Venus and
Adonis} 114 ; Lucrece, 115 ; his
sonnets, 122-126; theories regarding his early life, 196 ; in London,
197; his acting, 198 ; returns to
Stratford, 199; popular estimate
of his genius, 201; his characterisation, 203; Titus Andronicus,
203 ; first part of Henry VI., 204 ;
Richard II., 205, 213, 215 ; Love's
Labour Lost, 205 ; As You Like
It, 205 ; Comedy of Errors, 206 ;
Two Gentlemen of Veronay 206;
Richard III., 209 ; Henry V., 210212 ; Falstaff, 212 ; his comedies,
216 ; female characters, 218 ;
Romeo and Juliet, 219 ; Julius
Ccesar, 221-224; Macbeth, 224226 ; Hamlet, 226, 227; Coriolanus, 227 ; Antony and Cleopatra,
228; Othello, 228; King Lear,
228; The Tempest, 229.
Shirley, James, 310.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 66; sonnets to
Stella, 67, 68 ; embassy to Germany, 72 ; Arcadia, 73 ; Apologie
for Poetrie, 81-85 ; dramatic criticism, 85, 140.
Sismondi on the Sonnet, 61.
Skelton's Magnificence, 142.
Sonnet^ the, 6 1 ; development of, in
England, 121.
Spenser, Edmund, 8 2 ; influence of
his poetry, 86; education, 8 8 ;
attempts in the dramatic line, 90 ;
influence of Eosalind, 90 ; friendship for Sidney, 91 ; goes to Ireland, 92; clerk to the Council of

Munster, 9 3 ; writes his Faery
Queen, 94 ; returns to England, 94 ;
marriage, 95 ; death, 96; his works,
97 ; The Shepherd's Calendar, 98101; Muiopotmos, 101; TheRuines
of Time, 102 ; Tears of the Muses,
103 ; Mother Hubbard's Tale, 103;
Colin Clout's Come Home Againe,
104 ; the Epithalamion, 104 ; the
Faery Queen, 105 ; object and plan
of the book, 106 ; its allegory and
political allusions, 109.
Still, John, 150.
Suckling, Sir John, 358.
TAINE on the Drama, 140 ; on Shakspere's female characters, 218.
Taylor, Jeremy, 368.
Tom Tiler and his Wife, 143.
Tottel's,Miscellany, 59.
Tourneur, Cyril, his Atheist's Tragedy,
309.
UDALL'S Ralph Roister Doister, 149.
Utopia, More's, first book, 30 - 3 3 ;
second book, 33-41.
VAUGHAN, Henry, 363,

364.

Vaux, 65.
WARNER'S Albion's England, 127.
Watson, 68.
Webbe's Discourse on English Poetrie,
81.
Webster, John, 303 ; his White Devil
of Italy, 304; The Duchess of
Malfy, 305, 363.
Whetstone, George, his Promos and
Cassandra, 147.
Wither, George, 358, 361.
Wotton, Sir Henry, 132.
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 63, 64.

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