Raleigh

by Edmund Gosse

When these lines were shown to James I. he said he hoped that the man who wrote them would die before he did.

The death of Salisbury encouraged Raleigh once more. His intimacy with the generous and promising Prince of Wales had quickened his hopes. During the last months of his life, Henry continually appealed to Raleigh for advice. The Prince was exceedingly interested in all matters of navigation and shipbuilding, and there exists a letter to him from Raleigh giving him elaborate counsel on the building of a man-of-war, from which we may learn that in the opinion of that practised hand six things were chiefly required in a well-conditioned ship of the period: '1, that she be strong built; 2, swift in sail; 3, stout-sided; 4, that her ports be so laid, as she may carry out her guns all weathers; 5, that she hull and try well; 6, that she stay well, when boarding or turning on a wind is required.' Secure in the interest of the Prince of Wales, and hoping to persuade the Queen to be an adventurer, Raleigh seized the opportunity of the death of Salisbury to communicate his plans for an expedition to Guiana to the Lords of the Council. He thought he had induced them to promise that Captain Keymis should go, and that if so much as half a ton of gold was brought back, that should buy Raleigh his liberty. But the negotiations fell through, and Keymis stayed at home.

In September 1612, Raleigh was writing the second of his Marriage Discourses, that dealing with the prospects of his best and youngest friend. A month later that friend fell a victim to his extreme rashness in the neglect of his health. The illness of the Prince of Wales filled the whole of England with dismay, and when, on November 6, he sank under the attack of typhoid fever, it was felt to be a national misfortune. On the very morning of his death the Queen sent to Raleigh for his famous cordial, and it was forwarded, with the message that if it was not poison that the Prince was dying of, it must save him. The Queen herself believed that Raleigh's cordial had once saved her life; on the other hand, in the preceding August his medicines were vulgarly supposed to have hastened the death of Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland. The cordial soothed the Prince's last agony, and that was all. Henry had with great difficulty obtained from his father the promise that, as a personal favour to himself, Raleigh should be set at liberty at Christmas 1612. He died six weeks too soon, and the King contrived to forget his promise. The feeling of the Prince of Wales towards Raleigh was expressed in a phrase that was often repeated, 'No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.'

We learn from Izaak Walton that Ben Jonson was recommended to Raleigh while he was in the Tower, by Camden. That he helped him in obtaining and arranging material for the History of the World is certain. In 1613 young Walter Raleigh, having returned to London, and having, in the month of April, killed his man in a duel, went abroad under the charge of Jonson. They took letters for Prince Maurice of Nassau, and they proceeded to Paris, but we know no more. It was probably before they started that young Walter wheeled the corpulent poet of the Alchemist into his father's presence in a barrow, Ben Jonson being utterly overwhelmed with a beaker of that famed canary that he loved too well. Jonson, on his return from abroad, seems to have superintended the publication of the History of the World in 1614. A fine copy of verses, printed opposite the frontispiece of that volume, was reprinted among the pieces called Underwoods in the 1641 folio of Ben Jonson's Works. These lines have, therefore, ever since been attributed to that poet, but, as it appears to me, rashly. In the first place, this volume was posthumous; in the second, for no less than twenty-three years Ben Jonson allowed the verses to appear as Raleigh's without protest; in the third, where they differ from the earlier version it is always to their poetical disadvantage. They were found, as the editor of 1641 says, amongst Jonson's papers, and I would suggest, as a new hypothesis, that the less polished draft in the Underwoods is entirely Raleigh's, having been copied by Jonson verbatim when he was preparing the History of the World for the press, and that the improved expressions in the latter were adopted by Raleigh on suggestion from the superior judgment of Jonson. The character of the verse is peculiarly that of Raleigh.

It was in 1607, as I have conjectured, that Raleigh first began seriously to collect and arrange materials for the History of the World; in 1614 he presented the first and only volume of this gigantic enterprise to the public. It was a folio of 1,354 pages, printed very closely, and if reprinted now would fill about thirty-five such volumes as are devised for an ordinary modern novel. Yet it brought the history of the world no lower down than the conquest of Macedon by Rome, and it is hard to conceive how soon, at this rate of production, Raleigh would have reached his own generation. He is said to have anticipated that his book would need to consist of not less than four such folios. In the opening lines he expresses some consciousness of the fact that it was late in life for him, a prisoner of State condemned to death at the King's pleasure, to undertake so vast a literary adventure. 'Had it been begotten,' he confesses, 'with my first dawn of day, when the light of common knowledge began to open itself to my younger years, and before any wound received either from fortune or time, I might yet well have doubted that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me, long before the performance.' It is greatly to be desired that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, who at the close of a chequered career also prepared a Histoire Universelle, in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat for a plain statement of what Raleigh witnessed in the England of Elizabeth.

The student of Raleigh does not, therefore, rise from an examination of his author's chief contribution to literature without a severe sense of disappointment. The book is brilliant almost without a rival in its best passages, but these are comparatively few, and they are divided from one another by tracts of pathless desert. The narrative sometimes descends into a mere slough of barbarous names, a marish of fabulous genealogy, in which the lightest attention must take wings to be supported at all. For instance, the geographical and historical account of the Ten Tribes occupies a space equivalent to a modern octavo volume of at least four hundred pages, through which, if the conscientious reader would pass 'treading the crude consistence' of the matter, 'behoves him now both sail and oar.' It is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of the History of the World without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may dare assume that they are filled with angels. To hasten onwards would be impossible, so long as one of the errors of Steuchius Eugubinus remains unconfuted; and even then it is well to pause until we know the opinions of Orpheus and Zoroaster on the matter in hand. One whole chapter of four sections is dedicated to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the arguments of Goropius Becanus are minutely tested and found wanting. Goropius Becanus, whom Raleigh is never tired of shaking between his critical teeth, was a learned Jesuit of Antwerp, who proved that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise. It is not until he reaches the Patriarchs that it begins to occur to the historian that at his present rate of progress it will need forty folio volumes, and not four, to complete his labours. From this point he hastens a little, as the compilers of encyclopædias do when they have passed the letter B.

With all this, the History of the World is a charming and delightful miscellany, if we do not accept it too seriously. Often for a score of pages there will be something brilliant, something memorable on every leaf, and there is not a chapter, however arid, without its fine things somewhere. It is impossible to tell where Raleigh's pen will take fire. He is most exquisite and fanciful where his subject is most unhopeful, and, on the other hand, he is likely to disappoint us where we take for granted that he will be fine. For example, the series of sections on the Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth, or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of a wretched life.' So the most celebrated passages of the whole book, and perhaps the finest, are the address to God which opens the History, and the prose hymn in praise of death which closes it. The entire absence of humour is characteristic, and adds to the difficulty of reading the book straight on. The story of Periander's burning the clothes of the women closes with a jest; there is, perhaps, no other occasion on which the solemn historian is detected with a smile upon his lips.

By far the most interesting and readable, part of the History of the World is its preface. This is a book in itself, and one in which the author condescends to a lively human interest. We cheerfully pass from Elihu the Buzite, and the conjectures of Adricomius respecting the family of Ram, to the actualities of English and Continental history in the generation immediately preceding that in which Raleigh was writing. When we consider the position in which the author stood towards James I. and turn to the pages of his Preface, we refuse to believe that it was without design that he expressed himself in language so extraordinary. It would have been mere levity for a friendless prisoner, ready for the block, to publish this terrible arraignment of the crimes of tyrant kings, unless he had some reason for believing that he could shelter himself successfully under a powerful sympathy. This sympathy, in the case of Sir Walter Raleigh, could be none other than that of Prince Henry; and it may well have been in the summer of 1612, when, as we know, he was particularly intimate with the Prince and busied in his affairs, that he wrote the Preface. With long isolation from the world, he had lost touch of public affairs, as The Prerogative of Parliament would alone be sufficient to show. It is probable that he exaggerated the influence of the young Prince, and estimated too highly the promise of liberty which he had wrung from his father.

It took James some time to discover that this grave Rabbinical miscellany, inspired by Siracides and Goropius Becanus, was not wholesome reading for his subjects. On January 5, 1615, after the book had been selling slowly, the King gave an order commanding the suppression of the remainder of the edition, giving as his reason that 'it is too saucy in censuring the acts of kings.' It is said that some favoured person at Court pushed inquiry further, and extracted from James the explanation that the censure of Henry VIII. was the real cause of the suppression. Contemporary anecdote, however, has reported that the defamation of the Tudors in the Preface to the History of the World might have passed without reproof, if the King had not discovered in the very body of the book several passages so ambiguously worded that he could not but suspect the writer of intentional satire. According to this story, he was startled at Raleigh's account of Naboth's Vineyard, and scandalised at the description of the impeachment of the Admiral of France; but what finally drew him up, and made him decide that the book must perish, was the character of King Ninias, son of Queen Semiramis. This passage, then, may serve us as an example of the History of the World:

Ninus being the first whom the madness of boundless dominion transported, invaded his neighbour princes, and became victorious over them; a man violent, insolent, and cruel. Semiramis taking the opportunity, and being more proud, adventurous, and ambitious than her paramour, enlarged the Babylonian empire, and beautified many places therein with buildings unexampled. But her son having changed nature and condition with his mother, proved no less feminine than she was masculine. And as wounds and wrongs, by their continual smart, put the patient in mind how to cure the one and revenge the other, so those kings adjoining (whose subjection and calamities incident were but new, and therefore the more grievous) could not sleep, when the advantage was offered by such a successor. For in regno Babylonico hic parum resplenduit: 'This king shined little,' saith Nauclerus of Ninias, 'in the Babylonian kingdom.' And likely it is, that the necks of mortal men having been never before galled with the yoke of foreign dominion, nor having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and mother had used before him.