seems to me to be a signal instance of the wrong thing in the wrong place. It is quite true that More has, as Southey says, "lines and passages of sublime beauty." A man of his time, actuated by its noble thought, trained as we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thus habituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardly fail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one.
Something the same may be said of Joseph Beaumont, a friend of Crashaw, and like him ejected from Peterhouse, son-in-law of Bishop Wren, and, later, head of Jesus College. Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodox churchman, was a kind of adversary of More's, whose length and quaintness he has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in Psyche or Love's Mystery, a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in 1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this vast thing and his minor poems show, had fancy, taste, and almost genius on opportunity; but the prevailing mistake of his school, the idea that poetry is a fit vehicle for merely prosaic expression, is painfully apparent in him.
First, for various reasons, among the nondescripts of the Caroline school, deserves to be mentioned William Habington, a Roman Catholic gentleman of good upper middle-class station, whose father was himself a man of letters, and had some trouble in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, in the year of the plot itself, courted and married Lucy Herbert, daughter of his neighbour, Lord Powis, and published her charms and virtues in the collection called Castara, first issued in 1634. Habington also wrote a tragic comedy, The Queen of Aragon, and some other work, but died in middle life. It is upon Castara that his fame rests. To tell the truth it is, though, as had been said, an estimable, yet a rather irritating work. That Habington was a true lover every line of it shows; that he had a strong infusion of the abundant poetical inspiration then abroad is shown by line after line, though hardly by poem after poem, among its pieces. His series of poems on the death of his friend Talbot is full of beauty. His religion is sincere, fervent, and often finely expressed; though he never rose to Herbert's pure devotion, or to Crashaw's flaming poetry. One of the later Castara poems may be given:—
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"We saw and woo'd each other's eyes, My soul contracted then with thine, And both burnt in one sacrifice, By which our marriage grew divine. "Let wilder youths, whose soul is sense, Profane the temple of delight, And purchase endless penitence, With the stolen pleasure of one night. "Time's ever ours, while we despise The sensual idol of our clay, For though the sun do set and rise, We joy one everlasting day. "Whose light no jealous clouds obscure, While each of us shine innocent, The troubled stream is still impure; With virtue flies away content. "And though opinions often err, We'll court the modest smile of fame, For sin's black danger circles her, Who hath infection in her name. "Thus when to one dark silent room Death shall our loving coffins thrust: Fame will build columns on our tomb, And add a perfume to our dust." |
But Castara is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly charge on English literature as a whole—a foolish and almost canting prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' heads until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any one doubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless critic might connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more than orthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besides contributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, is invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism which is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it not been for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in a very strange fashion.
There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group—it would hardly be fair to call them a school—of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention has been paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merely to Davenant's Gondibert and Cowley's Davideis, but to Paradise Lost itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts of the Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tasso himself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic with something and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here by the work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill, the author of Thealma and Clearchus, was, with his work, introduced to the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of charming description and some very poetical phrase.
Much the same may be said of the Cupid and Psyche (1637) of the dramatist Shakerley Marmion (v. inf.), which follows the original of Apuleius with alternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is most original. The Leoline and Sydanis (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is not in couplets but in rhyme royal—a metre of which the author was so fond that he even translated the Troilus and Cressida of Chaucer into Latin, retaining the seven-line stanza and its rhymes. Kynaston, who was a member of both universities and at one time proctor at Cambridge, was a man interested in various kinds of learning, and even started an Academy or Museum Minervæ of his own. In Leoline and Sydanis he sometimes comes near to the mock heroic, but in his lyrics called Cynthiades he comes nearer still to the best Caroline cry. One or two of his pieces have found their way into anthologies, but until the present writer reprinted his works[60] he was almost unknown.
[60] In Minor Caroline Poets, vols. i. and ii. (Oxford, 1905-6). An important addition to the religious verse of the time was made by Mr. Dobell with the Poems (London, 1903) of Thomas Traherne, a follower of Herbert, with some strange anticipations of Blake.
The most important by far, however, of this group is William Chamberlayne, a physician of Shaftesbury, who, before or during the Civil War, began and afterwards finished (publishing it in 1659) the very long heroic romance of Pharonnida, a story of the most involved and confused character but with episodes of great vividness and even sustained power: a piece of versification straining the liberties of enjambement in line and want of connection in syntax to the utmost; but a very mine of poetical expression and imagery. Jewels are to be picked up on every page by those who will take the trouble to do so, and who are not offended by the extraordinary nonchalance of the composition.
The Theophila of Edward Benlowes (1603?-1676) was printed in 1652 with elaborate and numerous engravings by Hollar, which have made it rare, and usually imperfect when met with. Benlowes was a Cambridge man (of St. John's College) by education, but lived latterly and died at Oxford, having been reduced from wealth to poverty by the liberality which made his friends anagrammatise his name into "Benevolus." His work was abused as an awful example of the extravagant style by Butler (Character of a Small Poet), and by Warburton in the next century; but it was never reprinted till the date of the collection just noted. It is a really curious book, displaying the extraordinary diffusion of poetical spirit still existing, but in a hectic and decadent condition. Benlowes—a Cleveland with more poetry and less cleverness, or a very much weaker Crashaw—uses a monorhymed triplet made up of a heroic, an octosyllable, and an Alexandrine which is as wilfully odd as the rest of him.