Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come
At my request now.”
Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had so far shared that they played with the classic metres. |Excuses for this.| Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary, natural, and even inevitable. When there were no native models newer than Chaucer to follow, and when the splendour of classic literature was just being fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who were in search of a poetic form should have been deluded into thinking that they could reproduce what they admired, or should have agreed with Ascham that “to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks in true versifying, were even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely eat bread among men.”
Its little effect.
Then this mania, pedantry, or whatever other evil name may be given it, never attained to the dignity of doing harm. No Englishman who could write good rhyme was ever deterred from doing so by the fear that he would become a Goth, and eat acorns with swine. The real belief of the Elizabethan poets was expressed in The Arte of English Poesie, which tradition has assigned to George Puttenham. If we have not the feet of the Greeks and Latins, which we “as yet never went about to frame (the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it), we have instead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more than they ever had, by reason of our rime, and tunable concords, or simphonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore may be an arte in our vulgar, and that very methodicall and commendable.” The Arte of English Poesie was published in 1589. Webbe’s discourse had appeared three years before. The conflict, such as it was, was really over, though the superiority of “versifying” to rhyming might continue to be discussed as an academic question. Thomas Campion, who, as if to show the hollowness of his own cause, was a writer of rhymed songs of great beauty, might talk “of the childish titilation of riming” in his Art of English Poetry in 1602, and be answered by Daniel in his Defence of Ryme, but they were discussing “a question of the schools.” The attempt to turn English poetry from its natural course belongs to the curiosities of literary history.
Poetry of first half of Elizabeth’s reign.
Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth’s reign that we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the time. There was no great drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse had fallen. Those who look for an explanation of the flowering or the barrenness of literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence of genius in a people, may account for this by the troubled times which followed the death of Henry VIII. But the return of peace and security with the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The first twenty years of her reign were as barren as the disturbed years of Edward or Mary. Indeed they were even poorer, for Sackville’s Induction to The Mirror of Magistrates and his Complaint of Buckingham, which have been recognised as the best verse written in England between Chaucer and Spenser, though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne, had been written before 1559—in the reign of Mary. Between this year and the publication of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) the voice of poetry was not mute in England—at least not the voice of those who were endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe spoke, with more emphasis than respect, of the “infinite fardles of printed pamphlets,” mostly “either meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as either in matter or forme) to poetry,” by which “this country is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished,” he was not wholly exaggerating. Translators were very busy, and not a few published original work. There were certainly many others who wrote but did not publish. But these forerunners could in no case have deserved more than the praise which Sir John Harington gave to one of them, George Turberville:—
“When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured
To polish barbarism with purer style.”
Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville diminishes their claim even to so much as this.