Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.
We should not gather from Wyndham’s essay that the Phœnix and Turtle is a great poem, far finer than Venus and Adonis; but what he says about Venus and Adonis is worth reading, for Wyndham is very sharp in perceiving the neglected beauties of the second-rate. There is nothing to show the gulf of difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of any other Elizabethan. Wyndham overrates Sidney, and in his references to Elizabethan writings on the theory of poetry omits mention of the essay by Campion, an abler and more daring though less common-sense study than Daniel’s. He speaks a few words for Drayton, but has not noticed that the only good lines (with the exception of one sonnet which may be an accident) in Drayton’s dreary sequence of “Ideas” occur when Drayton drops his costume for a moment and talks in terms of actuality:
Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex’ great fall; Tyrone his peace to gain;
The quiet end of that long-living queen;
The king’s fair entry, and our peace with Spain.
More important than the lack of balance is the lack of critical analysis. Wyndham had, as was indicated, a gusto for the Elizabethans. His essay on the Poems of Shakespeare contains an extraordinary amount of information. There is some interesting gossip about Mary Fitton and a good anecdote of Sir William Knollys. But Wyndham misses what is the cardinal point in criticizing the Elizabethans: we cannot grasp them, understand them, without some understanding of the pathology of rhetoric. Rhetoric, a particular form of rhetoric, was endemic, it pervaded the whole organism; the healthy as well as the morbid tissues were built up on it. We cannot grapple with even the simplest and most conversational lines in Tudor and early Stuart drama without having diagnosed the rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century mind. Even when we come across lines like:
There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds,
we must not allow ourselves to forget the rhetorical basis any more than when we read:
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven