FOOTNOTES:
[27] See Works. Black's Edit., Vol. I. p. 212, compared with original Edit., pp. 113-114.
[28] Id., p. 272 and original Edit., pp. 177-178.
LEE'S LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE [29]
[29] A Life of Shakespeare. By Sidney Lee.
It is a pleasure to turn from the slovenly and perfunctory work, from the plausible charlatanry and pretentious incompetence which it has so often been our unwelcome duty to expose in these columns, to such a volume as the volume before us. It is books like these which retrieve the honour of English scholarship. A wide range of general knowledge, immense special knowledge, scrupulous accuracy, both in the investigation and presentation of facts, the sound judgment, the tact, the insight which in labyrinths of chaotic traditions and conflicting testimony can discern the clue to probability and truth—these are the qualifications indispensable to a successful biographer of Shakespeare. And these are the qualifications which Mr. Lee possesses, in larger measure than have been possessed by any one who has essayed the task which he has here undertaken. A ranker and more tangled jungle than that presented by the traditions, the apocrypha, the theories, the conjectures which have gradually accumulated round the memory of Shakespeare since the time of Rowe, could scarcely be conceived. In this jungle some, like Charles Knight, have altogether lost themselves; others, like Joseph Hunter, have struck out vigorously into wrong tracks, and floundered into quagmires. Halliwell Phillipps, sure-footed and wary though he was, certainly had not the clue to it. But Mr. Lee, who can plainly say with Comus,—
"I know each lane, and [every alley green,]
Dingle or bushy dell of this wild wood,
And every bosky bourne from side to side,
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood,"
has thridded it, and taught others to thrid it, as no one else has done. And he will have his reward. He has produced what deserves to be, and what will probably become, the standard life of our great national poet.
Mr. Lee's book is substantially a reproduction of his article on Shakespeare, contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, the high merits of which have long been recognised by scholars; and he has certainly done well to make that article popularly accessible by reprinting it in a separate form. But the present volume is not a mere reproduction of his contribution to the Dictionary; it is much more. He has here filled out what he could there sketch only in outline; what he could there state only as results and conclusions, he here illustrates and justifies by corroboration and proof. He has, moreover, both in the text and in the appendices, brought together a great mass of interesting and pertinent collateral matter which the scope of the Dictionary necessarily precluded.
More than a century ago George Steevens wrote: "All that can be known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where he commenced actor, wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried there." And, if we set aside probable inferences, this is all we do know of any importance about his life. His pedigree cannot certainly be traced beyond his father. Nothing is known of the place of his education—that he was educated at the Stratford Grammar School is pure assumption. His life between his birth and the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593, is an absolute blank. It is at least doubtful whether the supposed allusion to him in Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, and in Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream have any reference to him at all; it is still more doubtful whether the William Shakespeare of Adrian Quiney's letter, or of the Rogers and Addenbroke summonses, or the William Shakespeare who was assessed for property in St. Helens, Bishopsgate, was the poet. We know practically nothing of his life in London, or of the date of his arrival in London; we are ignorant of the date of his return to Stratford, of his happiness or unhappiness in married life, of his habits, of his last days, of the cause of his death. Not a sentence that fell from his lips has been authentically recorded. At least one-half of the alleged facts of his biography is as purely apocryphal as the life of Homer attributed to Herodotus.
But probability, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life, and on the basis of probability may be raised, it must be owned, a fairly satisfactory biography. Mr. Lee has not been able to contribute any new facts to Shakespeare's life, which is certainly not his fault; but he has given us a recapitulation, as lucid as it is exhaustive, of all that the industry of successive generations of memorialists from Ben Jonson to Halliwell Phillipps has succeeded in accumulating, and he has been as judicious in what he has rejected as in what he has adopted. From the curse of the typical Shakespearian biographer—we mean the statement of mere inference and hypothesis as fact—he is absolutely free. He has done excellent service in giving, if not finishing, at least swashing blows to the monstrous fictions of the theorists on the sonnets, particularly to the Fitton-Pembroke mare's nest, fictions which have been gradually generating a Shakespeare, as purely apocryphal as the Roland of the song or the Apollonius of Philostratus.
Mr. Lee's most remarkable contribution to speculative Shakespearian criticism, in which, we are glad to say, he does not often indulge, is his contention that the W. H. of the dedication to the sonnets was William Hall, a small piratical stationer. It is never wise to speak positively on what must necessarily be, till certain evidence is obtainable, a matter of speculation. But we are very much inclined to think that Mr. Lee's contention has at least something in its favour. Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus: "To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." It has generally been assumed that the "W. H." is the youth who is the hero of the first group of sonnets, and the poet's friend, and he has commonly been identified either with William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, or with Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The difficulties in the way of either hypothesis—and on each hypothesis not Babels merely, but cities of Babels have been raised—are to an unprejudiced mind insurmountable. Mr. Lee maintains with plausible ingenuity, but not, we think, conclusively, that there is no proof that the youth of the sonnets was named "Will" at all. His analysis of the "Will" sonnets is a masterpiece of subtle ingenuity, and well deserves careful attention. He then proceeds to adopt the theory that the word "begetter" is not to be taken in the sense of "inspirer," but simply as "procurer" or "obtainer" of the sonnets for T. T., i.e., the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. In other words, that Thorpe dedicated the sonnets to W. H., in return for W. H. having piratically obtained them for him. This is at least doubtful. In the first place it may reasonably be questioned whether "begetter" could have the meaning which is here assigned to it; the passages quoted from Hamlet ("acquire and beget a temperance") and from Dekker's Satiro-mastix, "I have some cousins german at Court shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels," are anything but conclusive. Still, Thorpe, who is by no means remarkable for the purity of his English, may have used it in the sense which Mr. Lee's theory requires.
Shakespeare's sonnets, as is well known, were circulating among his friends in manuscript, and Mr. Lee has discovered that one William Hall was well known as an Autolycus among publishers, and had already edited, under the initials W. H., a collection of poems left by the Jesuit poet, Southwell—in other words had already done for the publisher, George Eld, what it is assumed that he now did for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Lee's theory is, it must be admitted, plausible, and few would hesitate to pronounce it far more probable than the theory which would identify the enigmatical initials with the names of Pembroke or Southampton.
The chapters dealing with the sonnets are, in our opinion the most valuable contribution which has ever been made to this important province of Shakespearian study, and it may be said of Mr. Lee, as Porson said of Bentley, that we may learn more from him when he is wrong than from many others when they are right. His contention is, and it is supported with exhaustive erudition, that these poems are, in the main, a concession to the fashion, then so much in vogue, of sonnet writing; that their themes are the conventional themes treated in those compositions; that some of them were dedicated to Southampton, that some may be autobiographical, but that they are wholly miscellaneous, and tell no consecutive story, as so many critics have erroneously assumed. We cannot accept all Mr. Lee's theories and conclusions, but one thing is certain, that they are supported with infinitely more skill and learning than any other theories which have been broached on this hopelessly baffling problem.
We will conclude by noticing what seem to us slight blemishes in this admirable work. There is nothing to warrant the assertion on p. 158 that most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594, which is to cut the knot of a most difficult question. Indeed, with respect to the whole question of the sonnets, Mr. Lee is, we venture to submit, a little too dogmatic. It is a question which no one can settle as positively as Mr. Lee seems to settle it. There is surely no good, or even plausible reason for doubting the authenticity of Titus Andronicus, whatever innumerable Shakespearian critics may say, external and internal evidence alike being almost conclusive for its genuineness. There is nothing to warrant the supposition that Shakespeare was on bad terms with his wife. The famous bequest in his Will was probably a delicate compliment, and we are surprised that Mr. Lee should not have noticed this. Among the testimonies to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, Mr. Lee should have recorded that of Archbishop Sharp, who, according to Speaker Onslow, used to say "that the Bible and Shakespeare had made him Archbishop of York."
Mr. Lee must also forgive us for adding that, in this work at least, æsthetic criticism is not his strong point, and he would have done well to keep it within even narrower bounds than he has done. Many of those who would be the first to admire his erudition and the other scholarly qualities which are so conspicuous in every chapter of his book, will, we fear, take exception to much of his criticism, especially in relation to the sonnets. It is too positive; it is unsympathetic; it is too mechanical. But our debt to Mr. Lee is so great, that we feel almost ashamed to make any deductions in our tribute of gratitude.
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS [30]
[30] The Mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets: an attempted Elucidation. By Cuming Walters. Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearian Plays and Poems. By Jesse Johnson. Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered and in part Re-arranged, with Introductory Chapters, Notes and a Reprint of the Original 1609 Edition. By Samuel Butler.
There goes a story that an ingenuous youth, who had the privilege of an introduction to Lord Beaconsfield, resolved to make the best of the occasion, by extracting, if possible, from that astute political sage the secret of success in life. It might take the form, he thought, of a little practical advice. For that advice, explaining the object with which it was asked, he accordingly applied. "Yes," said Lord Beaconsfield, "I think I can give you some advice which may possibly be of use to you. Never trouble yourself about The Man in the Iron Mask, and never get into a discussion about the authorship of the Letters of Junius." In all seriousness we think it is high time that the "closure" should be applied to a debate on another "mystery" of which every one must be tired to death, except perhaps those who contribute to it. If some progress could be made towards the solution of the Mystery of Shakespeare's Sonnets, if there was the faintest indication of any dawn on the darkness, even the wearied reviewer would be patient. But the thing remains exactly where it was, before this appalling literary epidemic set in. During the last three or four years scarcely a month has passed without its "monograph," many of these treatises, mere replicas of their predecessors, differing only in degrees of stupidity and uselessness. Mr. Cuming Walters' volume, sensible enough and intelligent, we quite concede, simply thrashes the straw. It professes to be an original contribution to the question. There is not a view or theory in it, which is not now a platitude to every one who has had the patience to follow this controversy. It analyses the Sonnets; they have been analysed hundreds of times. It asks who was W. H.; it answers the question as it has been answered usque ad nauseam. It discusses the dark lady, and lands us in the same shifting quagmire of opinion in which Mr. Tyler and his coadjutors and opponents have been floundering for the last four years. It assumes, it rejects, it questions, it suggests, what has been assumed, rejected, questioned, and suggested over and over again. Indeed, it may now be said with literal truth that, unless some fresh discovery is made, nothing new, whether in the way of absurdity or sense, can be advanced on this subject. But books are multiplied with such rapidity and in such prodigious numbers in these days, that they thrive, like cannibals, on one another. The last comer is simply its forgotten predecessor in disguise.
But platitude is the very last charge that can be brought against Mr. Jesse Johnson's contribution to the curiosities of Shakespearian criticism. The theory advanced here is, that Shakespeare never wrote the Sonnets at all, that he was quite unequal to their composition, that the author of them "was probably fifty, perhaps sixty, and that he was besides a man of genius, which Shakespeare certainly was not. I would not," says Mr. Jesse Johnson, "deny to Shakespeare great talent. His success in and with theatres certainly forbids us to do so. That he had a bent or a talent for rhyming or for poetry, an early and persistent tradition and the inscription over his grave indicate. And otherwise there could hardly have been attributed to him so many plays, besides those written by the author of the Sonnets." Shakespeare may have been equal to trifles like Hamlet or Lear—for Mr. Jesse Johnson would be the last to dispute the claim made for Shakespeare as a hard-working playwright clearing his twenty-five thousand dollars a year (Mr. Jesse Johnson is calculating his income according to the present time)—but "to Shakespeare working as an actor, adapter or perhaps author came a very great poet, one who outclassed all the writers of that day, and it is the poetry of that great unknown which, flowing into Shakespeare's work, comprises all or nearly all of it which the world treasures or cares to remember." If we told Mr. Jesse Johnson, and all who resemble Mr. Jesse Johnson, the truth about their productions, we are quite certain of one thing—but the one thing of which we are certain it would, perhaps, be good taste in us to leave unsaid.
Of a very different order is Mr. Samuel Butler's Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered. This is the work of a scholar, but of a scholar mounted on a hobby-horse of unusually vigorous mettle. Mr. Butler begins with a tremendous onslaught on the theories of the Southamptonites, the Herbertists and the anti-autobiographical party; and in this part of his work he has certainly much to say which is both pertinent and plausible, nay, in our opinion, convincing. But he is less successful in construction than in demolition. His own contention is, that the Sonnets are undoubtedly autobiographical, and very derogatory to Shakespeare's moral character. He is satisfied that "Mr. W. H." was the youth who inspired them, not the youth who simply collected, or procured them, and gave them to Thorpe, but that this youth was neither the Earl of Southampton nor the Earl of Pembroke, nor, indeed, any one of superior social rank to the poet, though this has always been assumed. Adopting the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone that the key to the youth's name is to be found in the seventh line of the twentieth sonnet,—
"A man in hew all Hewes in his controlling."
and deducing, with them, from Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi. and cxliii. that the youth's Christian name was William, Mr. Butler believes, as they did, that the youth's name was William Hughes, or Hewes; and Mr. Butler is inclined to identify him, though he speaks, of course, by no means confidently, with a William Hughes, who served as steward in the Vanguard, Swiftsure and Dreadnought, and who died in March, 1636-7. Mr. Butler supports his theories with hypotheses which an impartial judge of evidence will find it difficult to concede. In the face of Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv. the contention that the youth was not in a superior social station to the poet cannot be maintained with any confidence. There are still graver difficulties in the way of supposing that the Sonnets were written between January, 1585-6 and December, 1588. That they could be the work of a young man between his twenty-first and his twenty-fourth year, and have preceded by some four years the composition of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, is simply incredible; but it is a question which cannot be argued, for we have nothing but mere hypothesis to go upon. Mr. Butler's arrangement and interpretation of the Sonnets are, moreover, purely fanciful. When Mr. Butler would have us believe that some of the Sonnets in the second group, from cxxvii. to clii., are addressed to and concern not the woman, but the youth, he asks us to accept a theory which is not only revolting, but which sets all probability at defiance. Similarly absurd, he must forgive us for saying, is his grotesquely repulsive interpretation of Sonnet xxxiv. Nor is there anything to justify the interpretation placed on Sonnets xxxiii. and xxxiv. or the collocation of cxxi. All that can be said for Mr. Butler's exceedingly ingenious and admirably argued theory is, that it supports a view of the question which, if it admits of no positive confutation, produces no conviction. No theory, based on an arbitrary arrangement of these poems and on positive deductions drawn, or rather strained, from most ambiguous evidence and from pure hypotheses, can possibly be satisfactory.
The problem presented in these Sonnets is undoubtedly the most fascinating problem in all literature, and it is as exasperating as it is fascinating. It appears to be so simple, it seems constantly to be on the verge of its solution, and yet the moment we get beyond a certain point in inquiry, the more complex its apparent simplicity is discovered to be, the more hopeless all prospect of explaining the enigma. Take the difficulty of assuming, what seems to be obvious, that they are autobiographical. Here we have the poet, and that poet Shakespeare, admitting the world into the innermost secrets of his life, taking his contemporaries, without the least reserve, into his confidence, inviting and assisting them to the study of his own morbid anatomy, and, in a word, stripping himself bare with all the shameless abandon of Jean Jacques and of Casanova. Everything that we know of Shakespeare seems to discountenance the probability of his having any such intention. No anecdote, with the smallest pretence to authenticity, couples his name with scandal. The theory which identifies him with the W. S. of Willobie's Avisa has no real basis to rest on, and without corroboration is absolutely inadmissible as evidence. Whatever Shakespeare's private life may have been, it is quite clear that he carefully regarded the decencies, and would have been the last man in the world to pose publicly in the character presented to us in the Sonnets. If the poems are autobiographical, we can only conclude that they were published without his consent, and even to his great annoyance. This may certainly have been the case, and is indeed often assumed to have been so. But even then it is, to say the least, curious, that there should have been no tradition about the extraordinary story which they tell, especially considering the distinction of the dramatis personæ. Assuming that the youth, who is their hero, was a real person, he must, judging from Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv., have been conspicuous in the society of that time; assuming the rival poet to be a real person, he must have been equally conspicuous in another sphere, while Shakespeare himself, at the time the Sonnets were published, was the most distinguished poet and playwright in London. It is, therefore, extraordinary that all traces of an affair in which persons of so much eminence were involved, and which would have furnished scandal-mongers with the topics in which such gossips most delight, should have entirely disappeared. We must either conclude that posterity has been very unfortunate in the loss of records which would have thrown light on the matter, or that Shakespeare's contemporaries knew nothing of the facts, and contented themselves with the poetry; or, lastly, that what we may call the fable of the Sonnets, the drama in which W. H., "the dark lady," and the rival poet play their parts, is as fictitious as the plot of The Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest.
It is not our intention to support any of the numerous theories which pretend to give us the key to these Sonnets, still less to propose any new one, but simply to show that the enigma presented by them is as insoluble as ever, and that all attempts to throw light on it have served to effect nothing more than to make darkness visible and confusion worse confounded. Let us briefly review the facts. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe, a well-known Elizabethan bookseller, published a small quarto volume, entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets, having apparently not obtained them from the poet himself, and to this volume was prefixed the following dedication:—"To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." Here begins and ends all that is certainly known about W. H. and his relation to these poems. No one knows who he was; no one knows what is exactly meant by the word "begetter," whether it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, whether that is to say W. H. is the youth celebrated in the Sonnets—"the master-mistress" of the poet's passion, or whether it simply means the person who got or procured the poems for Thorpe,—in which case the identification of the initials is of no consequence, unless we are to suppose that the youth who inspired them presented them to Thorpe. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his very able paper in the Fortnightly Review for February, 1898, and in his Life of Shakespeare, argues that there is no proof that the youth of the Sonnets was named "Will," though this has always been assumed to be the case. The evidence on which the point must be argued will be found in the puns on "Will" in Sonnets cxxxiv.-vi. and cxliii. It seems to us, we must own, that the balance of probability, though not certainly in favour of the affirmative, decidedly inclines towards it. Granting then,—for it is, after all, only an hypothesis,—that the initials W. H. are those of the youth celebrated in the Sonnets, to whom are they to be assigned? The youth, whoever he was, is represented as being in a social position superior to that of the poet; he has apparently rank and title; he has wealth; he is young and eminently handsome, his beauty being of a delicate, effeminate cast; he is highly cultivated and accomplished; he is on terms of the closest intimacy with the poet, by whom he is passionately beloved; he lives a free, loose life, and he intrigues with his friend's mistress.
Passing by all preposterous theories about William Harte, William Hughes, William Himself and the like, we come to the two names which seem worth serious consideration, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesly, third Earl of Southampton. The Pembroke theory, with Mr. Thomas Tyler's corollary identifying the "dark lady" with Mary Fitton, has been adopted by Dr. Brandes in his work on Shakespeare just published. But the difficulties in the way of accepting it are insuperable. They have been admirably discussed by Mr. Sidney Lee in the article to which we have referred. In the first place, while Shakespeare must have been on terms of more than brotherly intimacy with the youth of the Sonnets, there is no evidence at all that he had ever been in any other relation with the Earl than in the ordinary one of servant and patron. The words of Heminge and Condell, in the dedication of the first folio to Pembroke and his brother, merely state that they had both of them "prosequted" him with favour; in other words, been to him what they had been to many other dramatists and men of letters; and that is the only evidence of any connection between Shakespeare and Pembroke. Tradition was certainly silent about any relations between them, for Aubrey, as Mr. Lee has pointed out, though he has collected much information about both, says nothing about their acquaintanceship, though he mentions Pembroke's connection with Massinger, and Southampton's with Shakespeare. But Thorpe's dedication is conclusive against Pembroke. In 1609, Pembroke, who had succeeded to the title on the death of his father in January, 1601, was Lord Chamberlain, a Knight of the Garter, and one of the most distinguished noblemen in England. Is it credible that Thorpe would address him as Mr. W. H., more especially as in the other works which he inscribed to him,—and he inscribed several,—he is careful to give him all his titles, and to address him with the most fulsome servility? Again, Pembroke, as Mr. Lee points out, was never a "Mister" at all. As the eldest son of an earl, he was designated by courtesy Lord Herbert, and as Lord Herbert he is always spoken of in contemporary records. The appellation "Mr." was not, as Mr. Lee observes, used loosely, as it is now, and could never have been applied to any nobleman, whether holding his title by right or by courtesy. Whatever allowance may be made for a poet's passion and fancy, some weight must be attached to the insistence made in the Sonnets on the youth's delicate and effeminate beauty. It is true that we have no portraits of Pembroke before he arrived at middle age, but those portraits justify us in concluding that he could never, at any time, have been distinguished by beauty of the type indicated in the poems.
Against all this the advocates of the Pembroke theory have nothing to place but conjectures, a series of insignificant coincidences and the assumption that the woman in the Sonnets is to be identified with the woman who bore Herbert a child, Mary Fitton. The publication of Sonnet xliv. by Jaggard, in 1599, shows that the intrigue between the youth and the dark lady, which is the central event of the Sonnets, was already, and had probably been for some time, in full career, while there is no evidence that Pembroke was involved with Mary Fitton before the summer of 1600. But what finally disposes of this theory is the testimony afforded by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate's recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room. Indispensable requisites in the lady of the Sonnets are, that she should be dark, a "black beauty" with "eyes raven black," with hair which resembles "black wires," and that she should be a married woman; but the portraits—and there are two of them—of Mary Fitton, show that she had a fair complexion, with brown hair and grey eyes; and she remained unmarried, until long after her connection with Pembroke had ceased.
The theory which identifies W. H. with the Earl of Southampton is slightly more plausible, but the difficulties in the way of accepting it are, in truth, equally insuperable. This theory has at least one great point in its favour. Shakespeare was acquainted, and it may be inferred intimately acquainted, with Southampton, as the dedications of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece indicate. Of his affection and respect for this nobleman he has left an expression almost as remarkable as the language of the sonnets. "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater." This bears a singularly close resemblance to Sonnet xxvi.,—
"Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit,
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it."
And there is much in the Sonnets which can be made to coincide with what we know of Southampton. But, as we push inquiry, difficulties of all kinds begin to swarm in on us. The first is, as in the case of Pembroke, with the dedication. To say nothing of the fact that "W. H." is not "H. W."—the possibility of the appellation of "Mr." being applied to one who had been an Earl since 1581, and who had twice been addressed in dedications by his full titles, and that by Shakespeare himself, is a wholly inadmissible hypothesis. To argue that this was merely "a blind," is simply to beg the question. If the Sonnets were addressed to Southampton, they must have been written between 1593 and 1598. In 1593 Southampton was in his twenty-first year, in 1598 in his twenty-sixth; Shakespeare, respectively, in his thirty-first and thirty-fifth year. Now, what is especially emphasized in the sonnets is the youthfulness of the young man to whom they are dedicated, and the advanced age of the poet. In Sonnet cviii. the youth is addressed as "a sweet boy," in cxxvi. as "a lovely boy," in liv. as "a beauteous and lovely youth"; in xcv. his "budding name" is referred to, while the poet speaks of himself as "old," as "beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity," as being "with Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn." And so, as has been more than once pointed out, we have this anomaly—a man of thirty-four describing himself as a thing of "tanned antiquity" in writing to "a sweet and lovely boy" of twenty-five. No one could have been less like the effeminate youth of the Sonnets than Southampton. All we know about him, including his portraits, indicates that he was eminently masculine and manly. Again, it is matter of history that he greatly distinguished himself on the Azores expedition in 1597, acquitting himself with so much gallantry that, during the voyage, he was knighted by Essex. To this expedition, which must have involved one of those absences of which we hear so much in the Sonnets, to this exploit and this honour, which afforded so much opportunity for peculiarly acceptable compliment, Shakespeare makes no reference at all. There is nothing to indicate that the youth of the Sonnets had gained any military or political distinction, had taken any part in public life, or had ever been absent from England. To assume with Mr. Lee that the Sonnets were written in or before 1594, and therefore before Southampton had become distinguished, is to involve ourselves in inextricable difficulties. Even Mr. Lee admits that Sonnet cvii. must have reference to the death of Elizabeth in 1603. With regard to the supposed references to Southampton's relations with Elizabeth Vernon, no certain, or, to speak more accurately, no even plausible inferences can be drawn in any particular: all that they can be reduced to are degrees of improbability.
If, again, we accept the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone, supported by Mr. Butler, and suppose that W. H. was some obscure person, we are proceeding on mere hypothesis, and a hypothesis seriously shaken by the plain meaning expressed in Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii., and cxxiv.
The enigma of these Sonnets is, we repeat, as insoluble now as it was when inquiry was first directed to them. Whether they are to be regarded as autobiographical, as dramatic studies, as a mixture of both, as a collection of miscellaneous poems, as written to order for others, as mere exercises in the sonnet-cycle, or as all of these things, is alike uncertain. Our knowledge of the time of their composition begins and ends with the facts, that some of them were, presumably, in circulation in or before 1598, that two of them had certainly been composed in or before 1599, and that all of them had been written by 1609. The rest is mere conjecture; and on mere conjecture and mere hypothesis is based every attempt to solve their mystery. If certainty about them can ever be arrived at, it can only be attained by evidence of which, as yet, we have not even an inkling. The probability is, that it was Shakespeare's intention, or rather Thorpe's intention, to baffle curiosity, and, except in the judgment of fanatics, he has certainly succeeded in doing so.
For our own part we are very much inclined to suspect, that they owed their origin to the fashion of composing sonnet-cycles, that those cycles suggested their themes and gave them the ply; that the beautiful youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady are pure fictions of the imagination; and that these poems are autobiographical only in the sense in which Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet and Othello are autobiographical.
LANDSCAPE IN POETRY [31]
[31] Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson. By Francis T. Palgrave.
It would be scarcely possible for a critic of Mr. Palgrave's taste and learning to produce a treatise on any aspect of poetry, which would not be full of interest and instruction, and the present volume is a contribution, and in some respects a memorable contribution, to a particularly attractive subject of critical inquiry. Its purpose is to trace the history of descriptive poetry in its relation, that is to say, to natural objects and more particularly to landscape, by illustrating its characteristics at different periods, and among different nations. Beginning with the Homeric poems, Mr. Palgrave reviews successively the "landscape" of the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews, the mediæval Italians, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and of our own poets, from the predecessors of Chaucer to Lord Tennyson. That a work, covering an area so immense, should be far less satisfactory in some portions than in others is no more than what might be expected, and Mr. Palgrave would probably be himself the first to admit that, except when he is dealing with the classical poetry of Hellas, of ancient and mediæval Italy, and of our own country, his treatise has no pretension to adequacy. Even within these bounds there is much which is irrelevant, and much which is surprisingly defective. Where, as in a subject like this, the material at the author's disposal is necessarily so superabundant, surely the utmost care should have been taken both to keep within the limits of the theme proposed, and to select the most pertinent and typical illustrations. But when Mr. Palgrave illustrates "Homeric landscape" by the simile describing the heifers frisking about the drove of cows in the fold-yard, and the "Sophoclean landscape" by the simile of the blast-impelled wave rolling up the shingle, he lays himself open to the imputation of drawing at random on his commonplace book. Indeed, the pleasure with which lovers of classical poetry will read this book cannot fail to be mingled with the liveliest surprise and disappointment. Take the Homeric poems. If a reader, tolerably well versed in the Iliad and Odyssey, were asked for illustrations of the power with which natural phenomena are described, to what would he turn? Certainly not to Mr. Palgrave's meagre and trivial examples, three of which alone have any title to pertinence. He would turn to the winter landscape in Iliad, xii. 278-286, to the lifting of the cloud from the landscape in Iliad, xvi. 296:—
ὡς δ' ὁτ' αφ' ὑψηλης κορυφης ορεος μεγαλοιο
κινηση πυκινην νεφελην στεροπηγερετα Ζευς,
εκ τ' εφανεν πασαι σκοπιαι και πρωονες ακροι
και ναπαι, ουρανοθεν δ' αρ' ὑπερῥαγη ασπετος αιθηρ.
"As when Zeus, the gatherer of the lightning, moves a thick cloud from the high head of some mighty mountain, and all the cliffs and the jutting crags and the dells start into light, and the immeasurable heaven breaks open to its highest";
to the descent of the wind on the sea, Ib. xi. 305-308:—
ὡς ὁποτε Ζεφυρος νεφεα στυφελιξη
αργεσταο Νοτοιο, βαθειη λαιλαπι τυπτων;
πολλον δε τροφι κυμα κυλινδεται, ὑψοσε δ' αχνη
σκιδναται εξ ανεμοιο πολυπλαγκτοιο ιωης.
"As when the west wind buffets the cloudlets of the brightening south wind, lashing them with furious squall, and the big wave swells up and rolls along, and the spray is scattered on high by the blast of the careering gale";
or to the pictures of the billow-buffeted headland, and the wave bursting on the ship in Iliad, xv. 618-628; or to the storm-cloud coming over the sea in Iliad, iv. 277; or to the descent of the wind on the standing corn, Iliad, ii. 147. He would point, above all, to the description of Calypso's grotto, in Odyssey, v. 63-74; to that of the harbour of Phorcys, in Odyssey, xiii. 97-112; to the fountain in the grove, xvii. 205-211. Mr. Palgrave comments justly on Homer's minute observation of nature; but he only gives one illustration, where it is noticed in Odyssey, vi. 94, that the sea, in beating on the coast, "washed the pebbles clean." He might have added with propriety many others: as the "earth blackening behind the plough," in Iliad, xviii. 548; the bats in the cave, Odyssey, xxiv. 5-8; the birds escaping from the vultures, Iliad, xxii. 304, 305; the wasps "wriggling as far as the middle," σφηκες μεσον αιολοι, Iliad, xii. 167; the dogs and the lions, Iliad, xviii. 585, 586.
Mr. Palgrave observes that Homer "was not only familiar with the sea, but loved it with a love somewhat unusual in poets." We venture to submit that there is not a line in Homer indicating that he "loved" the sea, except for poetical purposes; like most of the Greeks he probably dreaded it; his real feeling towards it is no doubt indicated in his own words:—
ου γαρ εγω γε τι φημι κακωτερον αλλο θαλασσης
ανδρα γε συγχευαι.
—nothing crushes a man's spirit more than the sea. Mr. Palgrave justly points out that Hesiod's rude prosaic style and matter are not congenial to the poetic landscape, yet it is only fair to Hesiod to say, that his poetry is not without vivid touches of natural description, as the winter scene in Works and Days, 504 sqq., and his description of the beginning of spring, 565-569, show. Professor Palgrave next glances at the treatment of nature in the lyric poets, and very properly cites the lovely fragment of Alcman:
βαλε δη βαλε κηρυλος ειην
ὁς τ' επι κυματος ανθος ἁμ' αλκυονεσσι ποτηται,
ηλεγες ητορ εχων, ἁλιπορφυρος ειαρος ορνις,—
but in translating it makes a truly extraordinary blunder.
"Would I were the kingfisher, as he flies, with his mates in his feeble age, between wind and water."
νηλεγες ητορ meaning, as we need hardly say, "reckless heart"; it is exactly Byron's, "With all her reckless birds upon the wing." In the quotations from Sappho, Ibycus, and Pindar, Mr. Palgrave has been judicious and happy, but surely he ought to have found place for the lovely flower cradle of Iamus in the sixth Olympic Ode, and for the moonlight evening in the third Olympian,—only seven words, but what a picture!—while, in the popular poetry, the omission of the Swallow Song is inexplicable.[32] Nor can we forgive him the omission of the magnificent simile of the spring wind clearing away the clouds, in the thirteenth of the fragments attributed to Solon.
But it is in dealing with the Greek dramatists that Mr. Palgrave is most defective in illustration. It is not to the opening of the Prometheus, or to the conclusion, or, indeed, to any of the passages from this poet which Mr. Palgrave cites, that we must turn for Æschylean landscape, or for illustration of this poet's power of natural description. It is to his brief picture—his pictures of scenery, though singularly vivid, are always brief—of the airy seat "against which the watery clouds drift into snow,"
λισσας αιγιλιψ απροσδεικτος οιοφρων κρεμας
γυπιας πετρα (Supplices, 772-3),
where almost every word is a perfect picture, literally beggaring mere translation; it is to his description, so magical in its rhythm, of the mid-day sea slumbering in summer calm (Agamemnon, 548-50),
η θαλπος, ευτε ποντος εν μεσημβριναις
κοιταις ακυμων νηνεμοις ευδοι πεσων,
to his picture of the keen brisk wind, clearing the clouds away, to bring into relief against the sky the dark masses of waves tossing on the horizon (Agamemnon, 1152-54), to his world-famous
ποντιων κυματων
ανηριθμον γελασμα.
"The multitudinous laughter of the ocean waves."
—Prometheus, 89-90.
Mr. Palgrave has, of course, cited with reference to Sophocles the great chorus in the Œdipus Coloneus, but he has omitted to notice that, if Sophocles has not elsewhere given us so elaborate a piece of natural description, innumerable touches in the dramas, and more particularly in the fragments, show that he observed nature almost as minutely as Shakespeare. Nothing could be more vivid than the touches of description in the Philoctetes. From Euripides Mr. Palgrave cites nothing, observing that he rarely goes beyond somewhat conventional phrases. Surely Mr. Palgrave must have forgotten the magnificent description of Parnassus, as seen from the plain, in the Phœnissæ, the glorious description of a moonlight night, as represented on the tapestry, in the Ion, the vivid touches of natural description in the Bacchæ, that of the meadow in the Hippolytus, and the chorus about Athens in the Medea, to say nothing of the charming rural picture in the fragments of the Phaeton.[33] To say of Aristophanes that, in his treatment of nature, he rarely goes beyond somewhat common phrases, is to say what is refuted, not merely in the chorus referred to by Mr. Palgrave, but in the Frogs and in the Birds. He stands next to Homer in his keen sensibility to the charm of nature. Shelley himself might have written the choruses referred to. In dealing with the Alexandrian poets Mr. Palgrave passes over Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus entirely, and yet the fine picture of Delos given by Callimachus in the Hymn to Delos is one of the gems of ancient description, and Apollonius Rhodius abounds with the most graphic and charming delineations of scenery and natural objects. What a beautiful description of early morning is this!—
ημος δ' ουρανοθεν χαροπη ὑπολαμπεται ηως
εκ περατης ανιουσα, διαγλαυσσουσι δ' αταρποι,
και πεδια δροσοεντα φαεινη λαμπεται αιγλη.
Argon. i. 1280-1283.
"What time from heaven the bright glad morn coming up from the East begins to shine, and path and road are all agleam, and the dew-bespangled plains are flashing with the radiant light."
How vivid too, and with the vividness of modern poetry, are his descriptions of the cave of Hades and its neighbourhood (ii. 729-750), and the Great Syrtis (iv. 1230-1245)! In his selections from the Greek Anthology Mr. Palgrave is much happier; but here again he has many omissions, and among them the most remarkable illustration of Greek nature-painting to be found in that collection—namely, Meleager's idyll giving an elaborate description of a spring day, which might have been written by Thomson (Pal. Anthology, ix. 363). It may be observed in passing that ουρεσιφοιτα κρινα (Pal. Anth., v. 144) can hardly mean "lilies that wander over the hills," but lilies "that haunt the hills," and that ξουθαι μελισσαι in Theocritus, vii. 142, probably means "buzzing" bees, not "tawny."
In dealing with the Roman poets Mr. Palgrave is, with one exception, most unsatisfactory. From the poets preceding Lucretius, amply as the fragments would serve his purpose, he gives only one illustration. We should have expected the vivid picture given by Accius in his Œnomaus of the early morning:
"Forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem,
Cum e somno in segetem agrestis cornutos cient,
Ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas
Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent."
"Perchance before the dawn that heralds the burning rays, what time rustics bring forth the oxen from their sleep into the cornfields, to break up the red dew-spangled soil with the ploughshare, and turn up the clods from the soft soil";
or the wonderfully graphic description of a sudden storm at sea, in the fragments of the Dulorestes of Pacuvius:
"Profectione læti piscium lasciviam
Intuentur, nec tuendi capere satietas potest.
Interea prope jam occidente sole inhorrescit mare,
Tenebræ conduplicantur, noctisque et nimbum occæcat nigror,
Flamma inter nubes coruscat, cælum tonitru contremit,
Grando mixta imbri largifico subita præcipitans cadit,
Undique omnes venti erumpunt, sævi existunt turbines,
Fervit æstu pelagus."
"Glad at heart when they set out they gaze at the sporting fish, and are never weary of looking at them. Meanwhile, hard upon sunset, the sea ruffles, darkness gathers thick, the blackness of the storm-clouded night hides everything, flame flashes between the clouds, heaven shakes with thunder, hail, mingled with streaming rain, dashes suddenly down, from every quarter all the winds tear forth, wild whirlwinds rise, the sea boils with the seething waters."
With Lucretius, indeed, he deals fully, and this portion of his work leaves little to be desired. But a reference to the lines to Sirmio and one illustration from the Peleus and Thetis exhaust his examples from Catullus. We should have expected the picture of the stream leaping from the mossy rock into the valley beneath, in the Epistle to Manlius, of the morning chasing away the shadows in the Attis, and the lovely flower pictures in the Epithalamia. In dealing with Virgil most of Mr. Palgrave's citations are practically irrelevant; scarcely any of the passages which best illustrate Virgil's power of landscape painting being even referred to. "The Æneid," says Mr. Palgrave, "may be briefly dismissed. Natural description can have but little place in an epic." And yet what are the passages to which any one, who wishes to illustrate the charm and power of Virgil's pictures of scenery, would naturally turn? Surely to these: the description of the rocky recess which sheltered Æneas's ships (Æneid, i. 159-168), a picture worthy of Salvator; the picture of Ætna (iii. 570-582), which rivals the picture of it given by Pindar, a picture praised so justly by Mr. Palgrave himself; the description of a calm night (iv. 522-527); the wave-buffeted, gull-haunted rock (v. 124-128); and, above all, the scenery at the mouth of the Tiber, bathed in the rays of the morning sun, a picture unexcelled even by Tennyson. Nor even in the Georgics is any reference made to the superb description of a storm in harvest time (i. 216-334), or to the magnificent winter piece (iii. 349-370).
The remarks about the indifference of Propertius to natural scenery are most unjust. What a charming picture is this!—
"Grata domus Nymphis humida Thyniasin,
Quam supra nullæ pendebant debita curæ
Roscida desertis poma sub arboribus;
Et circum irriguo surgebant lilia prato
Candida purpureis mixta papaveribus."
El., I. xx. 35-39.
It may be conceded that Ovid is conventional and commonplace in his treatment of nature; but why is Valerius Flaccus, with his bold, vivid touches, left unnoticed? Why does one citation suffice for the many exquisite cameos which ought to have been given from Statius? Another inexplicable omission in Mr. Palgrave's work is the poem entitled Rosæ, attributed to Ausonius—a lovely poem, infinitely more beautiful than the epigram quoted by Mr. Palgrave from the Latin Anthology, and rivalling the fragment given by him from Tiberianus. Most readers would agree with him in his estimate of Claudian, but he might have added the fine description of Olympus in the De Consulatu Theodori, 200-210:
"Ut altus Olympi
Vertex, qui spatio ventos hiemesque relinquit,
Perpetuum nullâ temeratus nube serenum
Celsior exsurgit pluviis, auditque ruentes
Sub pedibus nimbos, et rauca tonitrua calcat;"
which Goldsmith, by the way, has borrowed and paraphrased in the Deserted Village, together with its sublime application:
As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form
Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles round its head.
Space does not serve to follow Mr. Palgrave through his chapters on Italian, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon poetry, in all of which his omissions are as remarkable as his citations; so we must content ourselves with making a few remarks on his treatment of the English poets. It is pleasing to see that, guided by Gray, he has done justice to Lydgate, but he has not noticed the distinguishing peculiarity of this poet in his description, his extraordinary sensitive appreciation of colour.
Among the Scotch poets of the fifteenth century a prominent place should have been given to Henryson who is not even mentioned. Mr. Palgrave hurries over the Elizabethan poets with too much expedition, and the poets of the eighteenth century fare even worse. Great injustice is done to Thomson. Why did not Mr. Palgrave, instead of citing what he calls Thomson's "cold" tropical landscape, for the purpose of contrasting it unfavourably with Tennyson's picture in Enoch Arden, give us instead the Summer morning—
"At first faint gleaming in the dappled East
... Young day pours in apace,
And opens all the lawny prospect wide,
The dripping rock, the mountain's misty tops
Swell on the sight, and brighten with the dawn,
Blue through the dusk the smoking currents shine,"
or
"The clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky";
or the rainbow in the Lines to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton? Dyer may be somewhat prosaic, but he is not a poet to be despatched in a treatise on descriptive poetry, without citation, in a few contemptuous lines: how vivid is his picture of a calm in the tropics!—
"The dewy feather, on the cordage hung,
Moves not; the flat sea shines, like yellow gold
Fused in the fire";
or his
"Rocks in ever-wild
Posture of falling";
or the charming landscape in Grongar Hill with such touches as these:
"The windy summit wild and high
Roughly rushing on the sky";
or
"Rushing from the woods the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires."
As Wordsworth said, "Dyer's beauties are innumerable and of a high order." It is very surprising that nothing should have been said about Shenstone and the Wartons, about Scott of Amwell, Jago, Crowe and Bowles, all of whom are, in various ways, remarkable as descriptive poets. And certainly Mr. Palgrave does scant justice to Cowper; his touch may be prosaic, but he always had his eye on the object, and his landscape lives. Surely, by the way, Mr. Palgrave is mistaken in supposing that Shelley apparently understood Alastor to mean a "wanderer"; he understood it, as the preface shows, to mean, what it means so often in Greek, "one under the spell of an avenging deity."
Here we must break off. Mr. Palgrave's is an important work, and it is the duty, therefore, of a critic to review it seriously, in the hope that, should it reach a second edition, which may be confidently anticipated, Mr. Palgrave may be disposed to do a little more justice to his most interesting subject.
Since this article was written Mr. Palgrave's lamented death has unhappily rendered all hope of what was anticipated in the last paragraph, vain. But the review has been reprinted, and with some additions, in the hope that it may not be unacceptable as a contribution, however slight and imperfect, to a subject of great interest to lovers of poetry.