Although the Elizabethan age was great in all forms of pure literature, except the prose romance and the satire, and was not wholly barren even of these, yet it was more copious, more uniformly excellent in the lyric, than in any other. Sir Walter Scott has spoken of the wind of poetry which blew throughout that wonderful generation. He was thinking of the drama; but this general inspiration which gives its grandeur to the activity of the time is to be traced more widely, and with less admixture of weakness in its songs, than in any other of its manifold activities. But this very extension of the lyric faculty, and the number of the singers, makes it not merely difficult but impossible to deal fully with the subject within the limits of our space. Of the sonnet writers we can speak with some approach to completeness, for there the field, though large, is not boundless. But the freer forms of lyric spread over all the life and literature of England. Raleigh, who was a soldier, politician, discoverer, colonist, historian, political writer, and amateur chemist, was also a lyric poet of more than note. So were the Jesuit missionary Southwell and the courtier Earl of Oxford. Some of the most beautiful lyrics in the language were written by pamphleteers, prose story-writers, and dramatists. The composer wrote his own songs, and some of them are among the best, while many are only just below that level. So much was the time penetrated by poetic fire, that gems of verse are to be found in its song-books for which no known author can be traced.
The Collections and Song-books.
The general wealth of the time in lyric poetry can be better appreciated by taking its miscellaneous collections, whether of pure poetry or of verse written to accompany music, than by a list of the names of writers who may be held to deserve particular mention. Putting aside Tottel’s Miscellany as belonging to an earlier time, though it was repeatedly reprinted under Elizabeth, and The Mirror of Magistrates, which stands apart, there were numerous collections of minor pieces made in the queen’s reign. The Paradise of Dainty Devises, 1576; A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, 1578; A Handful of Pleasant Delights, 1584; The Phœnix Nest, 1593; England’s Helicon, 1600; A Poetical Rhapsody, 1602; England’s Parnassus, 1600; and Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses, in the same year, are the names of some of them. To these are to be added the list of song-books collected or written by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others.[65] Some of the poems in these collections have always been known, but they contain many which had fallen entirely into obscurity. There can have been very few readers to whom Mr Bullen’s collection, made from a class of books which in most ages are full of mere insipidities, was not a revelation. The point is that it represents not the exceptional work of the time, but the average production, which we may almost call commercial, or the poets’ corner, and that being this, it maintains such an extraordinarily high level of inspiration and melody. It is not a mere question of that workmanlike dexterity which a great poet, as Scott said half humorously, but not without truth, to Moore, can teach a receptive generation. Spenser himself could never have taught anybody to produce such a piece of genuine lyric poetry as the “Fain would I change that note,” which Mr Bullen quotes from Captain Hume’s First Part of Airs. It, and much else only less good, would not have been written without Spenser and Sidney; but it is one thing to be influenced by great models, and another merely to echo them.
The historical poems.
The love of verse led in England, as in Spain, to the production of not a little in what is almost inevitably a bastard kind—the historical poem. By attempting to do in poetry what could be adequately done in prose, the authors of The History of the Civil War or of The Barons’ Wars, condemned themselves to be often dull, or to endeavour to escape dulness by mixing purely romantic episodes with what professes to be record of matter of fact. The romance is superfluous to those who read for the history, and the history is tiresome to those who read for the romance. Our own historical poems are commonly the more subject to the danger of dulness, because the authors, unlike the Spaniards, did not, as a rule, choose the great events of their own time, or of the previous generation, of which the memory was still fresh. They went back to the past, which they could only know through books. This would have done no harm if they had used their authorities only to find “local colour” for their romance. But they did not. They aimed at even a minute historical accuracy, and thereby condemned themselves to produce works of learning in an inappropriate shape. It is no doubt bad criticism to condemn any form of literature for being itself and not another. Yet we could spare even the Polyolbion for an Elizabethan Mariana, which Drayton, whose prose was excellent and whose learning was great, might well have been, and still have left himself free to write his sonnets, his Nymphidia, and his Ballad of Agincourt.
Fitz-Geoffrey and Markham.
The curious literary bad fortune which has pursued the achievements of Englishmen at sea is well illustrated by the vehement, but also frothy and flamboyant, poem of Charles Fitz-Geoffrey, called Sir Francis Drake, his Honourable Life’s Commendation and his Tragical Death’s Lamentation. It is in the seven-line stanza which Drayton, after first trying it, renounced as too soft for the subject of his Barons’ War. Fitz-Geoffrey wraps up the substantial figure of Sir Francis in clouds of hyperbole, and makes a terrible abuse of the figure called “by the Latines Reduplicatio.” We see the great corsair only in glimpses through the very smoky flames of Fitz-Geoffrey’s melodious rhetoric. The most honourable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvill, by Gervase Markham, in an eight-lined stanza, very flowing and mythological, has much the same defect. The author, who founded his poem on Raleigh’s pamphlet describing the last fight of the Revenge, endeavours to “outcracke the scarcrow thunderbolt.”
Warner.
Three names stand out among the writers of historical poems—William Warner, because he was at once a forerunner to the others and a link between the poetry of the earlier and the later Elizabethans; Daniel, for a certain mild, yet grave, wisdom; Drayton, for his manly force and intrinsic poetic power. Warner, who was born about 1567, and who certainly died in March 1609 (the year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published), was attached in some uncertain relationship as client or servant to the Careys, Lords Hunsdon. His historical poem, Albion’s England, was in part written before 1586, when it was suppressed for some unknown reason by an order of the Star Chamber.[66] If this date is correct, the decidedly jejune account of the defeat of the Armada, and the most unfriendly passage on the execution of Queen Mary, must have been added later. Warner had written a collection of prose stories called Syrinx, as he says, “with acceptance.” But his claim to be remembered rests on his Albion’s England, a long poem in the old seven-foot or fourteen-syllable metre, on the history, and more particularly on the legends of the history, of England. His well-established reputation as “a good, honest, plain writer” is fully deserved. Warner, indeed, carries plainness so far that in the most poetic passage of his book—the episode of Curan and Argentill, in which there is a genuine simple poetry—he tells us that the hero “wiped the drivel from his beard.” Beginning at the creation of the world, he comes down to his own time, with constant digressions into romantic episodes of his own growing, and classical or Biblical tales. He does not always escape the tendency of his metre to drop into a jog-trot, yet in the main he canters briskly along with a very fair proportion of spirited lines. His farewell to Queen Mary is worth quoting, both as an example of his verse and as a rather engaging mixture of charity and implacability:—