THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT.
Not many years intervened between the uncouth gorgeousness of Hawes, the homely sense of Barclay, the anomalous genius of Skelton, and the pure poetry of Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey. In the poems of Surrey, and his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt,[1] the elder, the age of taste, if not of genius, opens on us. Dryden and Pope sometimes seem to appear two centuries before their date. There is no chronology in the productions of real genius; for, whenever a great master appears, he advances his art to a period which labour, without creation, toils for centuries to reach.
The great reformer of our poetry, he who first from his own mind, without a model, displayed its permanent principles, was the poetic Earl of Surrey. There was inspiration in his system, and he freed his genius from the barbaric taste or the undisturbed dulness which had prevailed since the days of Chaucer. His ear was musical, and he formed a metrical structure with the melodies of our varied versification, rejecting the rude rhythmical rhyme which had hitherto prevailed in our poetry. He created a poetic diction, and graceful involutions; a finer selection of words, and a delicacy of expression, were now substituted for vague diffusion, and homeliness of phrases and feeble rhymes, or, on the other hand, for that vitiated style of crude pedantic Latinisms, such as “purpúre, aureáte, pulchritúde, celatúre, facúnde,” and so many others, laborious nothings! filling the verse with noise. The contemplative and tender Surrey charms by opening some picturesque scene or dwelling on some impressive incident. He had discerned the error of those inartificial writers, whose minute puerility, in their sterile abundance, detailed till nothing was remembered, and described, till nothing was perceptible. Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. Surrey struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor three centuries past.
These rare qualities in a poet at such a period would of themselves form an era in our literature; but Surrey also extended their limits; the disciple of Chaucer was also the pupil of Petrarch, and the Earl of Surrey composed the first sonnets in the English language, with the amatory tenderness and the condensed style of its legitimate structure. Dr. Nott further claims the honour for Surrey of the invention of heroic blank verse; Surrey’s version of Virgil being unrhymed.
When Warton suggested that Surrey borrowed the idea of blank verse from Trissino’s “Italia Liberata,” he seems to have been misled by the inaccurate date of 1528, which he affixed to the publication of that epic. Trissino’s epic did not appear till 1547,[2] and Surrey perished in the January of that year. It was indeed long a common opinion that Trissino invented the versi sciolti, or blank verse, though Quadrio confesses that such had been used by preceding poets, whose names he has recorded. The mellifluence and flexibility of the vowelly language were favourable to unrhymed verse; while the poverty of the poetic diction, and the unmusical verse of France, could never venture to show itself without the glitter of rhyme. The heroic blank verse, however, was an after-thought of Surrey: he first composed his unrhymed verse in the long Alexandrine, had afterwards felicitously changed it for the decasyllabic verse, but did not live to correct the whole of his version. Surrey could not therefore have designed the pauses and the cadences of blank verse in his first choice, nor will they be found in his last. Nor can it be conceded that blank verse was wholly unknown among us. Webbe, a critic long after, in the reign of Elizabeth, considers the author of Pierce Ploughman as “the first whom he had met with who observed the quantity of our verse, without the curiosity of rhyme.”
Dr. Nott, with editorial ardour, considers that the unfinished model of Surrey was the prototype of all subsequent blank verse, and was also the origin of its introduction into dramatic composition. A sweeping conclusion! when we consider the artificial structure of our blank verse from the days of Milton, who, not without truth, asserted that “he first gave the example of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” This indeed has been denied to Milton by those who look to dates, and have no ear; and are apt to imagine that rhymeless lines, mere couplets, with ten well-counted syllables in each, must necessarily form blank verse. Dr. Nott, in quoting the eulogy of Ascham on this noble effort of Surrey “to bring our national poetry to perfection,” has omitted to add what followed, namely, the censure of Surrey for not having rejected our heroic verse altogether, and substituted the hexameter of Virgil, in English verse. It is therefore quite evident that Ascham had formed no conception of blank verse, no more than had Surrey, such as it was to be formed by the ear of Milton, and by some of his successors. All beginnings are obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.
Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological history, of this poetic Earl of Surrey be now written, it would assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions, and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence, while we know but little of the person.
The youth of Surrey, and his life, hardly passed beyond that period, betrayed the buoyancy of a spirit vehement and quick, but rarely under guidance. Reckless truth, in all its openness and its sternness, was his habit, and glory was his passion; but in this restlessness of generous feelings his anger too easily blazed forth. He was haughty among his peers, and he did not even scorn to chastise an inferior. We are not surprised at discovering that one of so unreserved a temper should in that jealous reign more than once have suffered confinement. But the youthful hero who pursued to justice a relative and a court favourite, for a blow, by which that relative had outraged Surrey’s faithful companion—he who would eat flesh in Lent—he who issued one night to break the windows of the citizens, to remind them that they were a sinful race, however that might have been instigated by zeal for “the new religion”—all such things betrayed his enthusiastic daring, but his deeds, to become splendid, depended on their direction. The lofty notions he attached to his descent; his proud shield quartering the arms of the Confessor, which the duke, his father, dared not show to a jealous monarch; his feats of arms at the barriers, and his military conduct in his campaigns,