“Since Galateo[[237]] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”
He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s own “emblems” in the Calendar, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in The Dying Pelican, is certainly, or in the Dreams, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the Faerie Queene, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s Nine Comedies [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is to the Orlando, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words, “If so be the Faery Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and fear Nemesis.
After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to “mea[“mea] domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[[238]]
The Puritan attack on Poetry.
Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly transcending form.
Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about their private history and character. Gosson. What disgust, what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.
Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s School of Abuse,[[239]] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled Reply,[[240]] and the famous Defence of Poesy or Apology for Poetry[[241]] which Sidney (to whom Gosson had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or (more probably from what we know of him) out of amiable and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult, he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.
The School of Abuse (which is written in such a style as almost to out-Euphuise the contemporary Euphues itself) is critical wholly from the moral side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or possible, state of poetry. The School of Abuse. There are even, the author says, some good plays, including at least one of his own; but the whole of ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical with those which Puritan teachers had for some years past been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral and religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with the lies and the licence of poets and players.
Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it may be the Honest Excuses to which Gosson refers as having been published against him) is almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little personal invective. Lodge’s Reply. Lodge strings together all the classical names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that Poetry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even the theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any independent justification of them as good ones, especially from the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—though interesting as critical work from the associate of great creators in drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction—is merely one of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence to an attack, logically as unreal though actually dangerous. The charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa[[242]] at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in all countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet them with weapons of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because the defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was being provided by one of themselves in the shape of The Faerie Queene.
Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more importance. Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. It is not free from faults—in fact, it has often been pointed out that some of Sidney’s doctrines, if they had been accepted, would have made the best efforts of Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which more presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he does not give exclusive attention to it.