LAURELS AND LAUREATES.
A young lady of Thessaly, celebrated for her beauty and modesty, was admired by a dissolute young gentleman, a native of the erratic isle of Delos. This roving blade was of high birth and consummate address, yet the nymph was more than coy; she turned from him with aversion, and when he would have pressed his suit, she took to her heels along the banks of the Peneus. The audacious lover darted after her, as a greyhound in pursuit of a hare; and the fugitive, perceiving that she must lose the race, implored the gods to screen her. The breath of the pursuer was fanning her "back hair;" his hands stretched forth to stop her; but as he closed them, instead of the prize that he expected to secure, he embraced an armful of green leaves. The hunter had lost his game in a thicket of bay or female laurel. Inconsolable, he shed some natural tears; but having a conceit in his misery, he twined a branch of the laurel into a wreath, and placed it on his head in memorial of his misadventure. A glance at himself in the nearest pool of the river told him that the glossy ornament was becoming to his fine complexion; and the youth, being a poet and pretty considerably a coxcomb, wore one ever after; and it has been the custom ever since to adorn the brows of all great poets, and of some small ones, with sprigs of laurel.
"Tis sung in ancient minstrelsy
That Phœbus wont to wear
The leaves of any pleasant tree
Around his golden hair;
Till Daphne, desperate with pursuit
Of his imperious love,
At her own prayer transform'd, took root—
A laurel in the grove.
Then did the Penitent adorn
His brow with laurel green;
And mid his bright locks, never shorn,
No meaner leaf was seen;
And poets sage through every age
About their temples wound
The bay."
So sings our living laureate; and this authentic anecdote, familiar to every schoolboy who studies ancient history in Ovid, shows that the coronation of poets was customary long before the age of Homer; and coeval, as it were, with poetry itself. The disappointed lover of Daphne, the first poet, was also the first laureat, and placed the crown on his head with his own hands, as many poets have done since, with a frank Napoleon-like self-appreciation. Having afterwards quarrelled with his father, and been expelled from home for sundry extravagancies, he returned with his lyre and laurel into Thessaly, the land of his first love—primus amor Phœbi, Daphne Peneia—and for nine years served a prince of that country in the double capacity of poet and shepherd. Thus, though the exact date is not ascertained, the original tenure of the honourable office of poet-royal is pretty clearly traced to Apollo himself.
But if we proceed from Apollo, our chapter on laureates will be longer than the tail of a comet. We must apply our wise saws to comparatively modern instances, hardly glancing for a moment even as far back as the age of Augustus, to observe that, of his two laurelled favourites, Virgil and Horace, the latter loftily maintains the dignity of the poet's position, when, in his Ode to Lollius, he shows that the alliance between poetic and regal or heroic power, was mutually important from the earliest ages. Kings, wise and great, flourished before Agamemnon, but are utterly forgotten:
"Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!
They had no poet, and they died:
In vain they schemed, in vain they bled!
They had no poet, and are dead."
Petrarch is, perhaps, the first eminent poet, among Christians, whose genius is indisputably associated with the laurel crown, which was conferred on him with all form, at Rome, by authority of the king, senate, and people, in especial token of his quality of poet. But the laurel was conspicuously the type of his fame in that character. His mistress was a laurel in name, and a Daphne in nature, if we give credence to his melodious complaints of her coldness. Many persons have doubted the very existence of Laura as any thing but an Apollonic laurel, or poetical abstraction of glory, almost too subtle for analysis by metaphysics. We have no such doubt of her materiality; for, over and above all other evidence, there are many passages in those songs and sonnets, that tell of a love, in the poet at least, which, though ever refined, was not all spiritual. In the same way, Dante's Beatrice has been pronounced an incorporeal creation,—a vision of theology, though in his Vita Nuova he expressly declares who she was, where and when she was born, her age and his own, when he first met her, and the year and the day, and the very hour, when she died. Milton read them both truly, and recognised in their writings the language of the human heart, and the truth of human passion undebased by a particle of grossness. Speaking of the laureate fraternity of poets, and of his own early partiality for the elegiac writers, he nobly says: "Above them all, I preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but in honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression." After that lofty encomium from such authority, may we venture to observe that among the laureates of Italy there is one still greater poet than the Recluse of Avignon? We do not say a greater man, for the popular reputation of Petrarch, resting as it does on his accomplishment of verse, is not perhaps founded on the strongest of his claims to admiration. But Tasso, too, was a formally laureated bard. And his chaplet was unwithered in the dungeon, to which the cruellest Turk among the desecrators of Jerusalem would hardly have condemned him, for merely presumptuous aspirations after a bright ornament of his harem. Tasso's eulogium, in his grand epic, of the Christian prince who afterwards became his jailer, is an immortal reprobation of the unfeeling tyrant. The wrongs of genius are avenged even by its praise, which, when thus proved to have been undeserved, is satire undisguised. Petrarch and Tasso appear to be the only distinguished laureates of Italy. The rest were mere versifiers, for the most part fluent and insipid. But some Italian poets were complimented with the laurel in Germany, where the poetical college, founded at Vienna by Maximilian I., produced few native laureates worthy of the honour. Yet "the Emperors of Germany," says D'Israeli, who condemned the Abbé Resnel's memoir on the subject, "retained the laureateship in all its splendour. The selected bard was called Il Poeta Cesareo. Apostolo Zeno, as celebrated for his erudition as for his poetic powers, was succeeded by that most enchanting poet Metastasio,"—of whom, by-the-by, Sir James Mackintosh has also written in enthusiastic commendation; not, however, for his felicity as a poet, but for the deep and well-digested critical learning displayed in his prose treatise on Aristotle's Art of Poetry. "The French," continues Mr D'Israeli,—and we quote what he borrows from Resnel, because, though they do not tell us much, scarcely any other persons have hitherto told us any thing to the purpose on this matter,—"the French never had a poet-laureate, though they had royal poets, for none were ever solemnly crowned. The Spanish nation, always desirous of titles of honour, seem to have known that of the laureate; but little information concerning it can be gathered from their authors." We fear there must have been something suggestive of the hard, dry, see-saw of the turpis asella in the tone of the Spanish laureates; for Sancho Panza, in his tender consolation to his ass Dapple, when they had both tumbled into the quarry, says, "Yo prometo de ponerte una corona de laurel en la cabeza que no parezcas sino un laureado poeta, y de darte los piensos dobados." "I promise to give thee double feeds, and to place a crown of laurel on thy head, that thou mayest look like a poet-laureate."
But our main business is with the laureates of England; and the origin of their office is sufficiently obscure, and not the less worthy of consideration for the antiquity that such obscurity implies. It has certainly been associated with our monarchical institutions from very early times; and, for that reason alone, if for no other, we should be disposed, in this antimonarchical fever of the day, to respect the loyalty of the office, however little respect may have been due to some who have held it, and however higher than the office is every true poet, "whose mind to him a kingdom is," and who possesses a royalty of his own, wider than that of Charlemagne. We do not know that the poets cited in the Saxon Chronicle were rhymers more inspired by the mead of the court than of the cloister; but the supposition is not improbable,—for we do know the fondness of Alfred for the gleeman's craft, and that he, "lord of the harp and liberating spear," was himself a gleeman; nor are we unmindful that King Canute honoured verse-men, and that he could even improvise an accordant rhyme, still extant, to the holy chant of the monks of Ely, as his bargemen rowed him down the Ouse, under the chapel wall. It is not apparent that trouvères followed William of Normandy to Sussex officially, or celebrated his triumph over Harold,—for the story of Taliefer is hardly a case in point, and we do not hear much about the northern trouvères till somewhat later, though some writers will have it that they are of older standing than the troubadours of the south of France. We do not imagine that William Rufus patronised harmony more intellectual than the blast of the hunting-horn. But so early at least as the twelfth century, in the reign of Richard, "the heart of courage leonine," as Wordsworth calls him, we have a king's versifier in the person of Gulielmus, of whom little is known, except that he produced a poem on the crusade of this romantic, poetical, bones-breaking Richard,—a prince whose Gothic blood (for it must be remembered that he was of the restored Saxon line) might seem to have been tinged with orientalism by some unaccountable process; for, even before his embarkation on his adventure with his red-cross knights, his character exhibited a strange combination of the stout and somewhat obtuse doggedness of the bandog, and the lordliness of the lion—a mixture of Saxon homeliness and Saracenic magnificence. The strength of thews and sinews, and the prowess of mere animal courage, (vulgar glories, for the most part, looked at with civilised eyes,) wear an aspect of redeeming generosity in Richard, that still recommends him to us as a hero of romance, worthy of minstrel praise, in spite of his ferocious temper, his demerits as a son, and his indomitable wrong-headedness as a prince. The poem of Gulielmus is not extant, but it must have been interesting if he possessed any genius. Richard's rough warfare with the Soldan, his marriage with Berengaria, and his delivery from the dungeon of the base Duke of Austria, were subjects as pregnant as any of the adventures of Hercules, an idol of hero-worship whom he in some respects resembles. In King John's reign, the poets seem to have been against the king, and in favour of the opposing barons. Whether he consoled himself with the stipendiary services of a court poet, we do not discover. Throughout his long and troubled reign he seems to have been pelted with lampoons.
In the year 1251, reign of Henry III., the King's versifier was requited by an annual pension of 100 shillings—not such a very niggardly stipend as it now sounds, if we compare the value of money in those times with the price of commodities. In the two following reigns we find a poet-royal of some repute in Robert Baston. He was a Carmelite monk, and attained the dignity of prior of the convent of that order at Scarborough. Bishop Bale (in his Illustrûm Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium) says that Baston was a laureated poet and public orator at Oxford, which Wood denies. But Bale might have had access to information which could no longer be authenticated in Anthony's time; for Bale, though he lived to be Edward the Sixth's Bishop of Assory, and a prebendary of the Cathedral of Canterbury, where he died and was buried, had himself been a Carmelite friar. "Great confusion," observes Warton, "has entered into the subject of the institution of poets-laureate, on account of the degrees in grammar, which included rhetoric and versification, anciently taken in our universities, particularly at Oxford, on which occasion a wreath of laurel was presented to the new graduate, who was afterwards usually styled Poeta Laureatus. These scholastic laureations, however, seem to have given rise to the appellation in question. With regard to the poet-laureate of the Kings of England, he is undoubtedly the same that is styled the king's versifier in the thirteenth century. But when or how that title commenced, and whether this officer was ever formally crowned with laurel at his first investiture, I will not pretend to determine, after the researches of the learned Seldon have proved unsuccessful. It seems probable that at length those only were in general invited to this appointment who had received academical sanction, and had merited a crown of laurel in the universities for their abilities in Latin composition, particularly Latin versification. Thus the king's laureate was nothing more than a graduated rhetorician, employed in the king's service." Warton adds an opinion, which seems well founded, "that it was not customary for the royal laureate to write in English till the Reformation had begun to diminish the veneration for the Latin tongue, or rather till the love of novelty, and a better sense of things, had banished the pedantry of monastic erudition, and taught us to cultivate our native language." It is true, that neither before nor after the Conquest was there any lack of rhymers in the vulgar tongue, whether Saxon or Norman, or mixed; and they would be the popular poets, but not exactly the poets in fashion at court. At all events, the fashion of writing court poems in low Latin began early and continued long; and we suspect that the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, whom the monkish historians call joculatores regis, were for the most part mere merrymen, as their monkish sobriquet implies—jugglers, dancers, fiddlers, tumblers. Berdic, the king's fool, is styled Joculator Regis in Doomsday Book. Some of these retainers, no doubt, could both compose ballads and sing them, suiting the action to the word, and they might occasionally amuse the court with their songs; but the authentic poet for state occasions was the Latin verse-maker. We say this with all due love and regard for our ballad-singers, old and modern, from King Alfred to Alfred Tennyson; and remembering, too, that we have two good sets-offs against Harry Hotspur's sneer at "metre ballad-mongers,"—one in Sir Philip Sidney's declaration that the ballad of the Percy hunt in Cheviotdale stirred his heart like the sound of a trumpet; and another, in the fact that one of the most illustrious of modern Percys, the Bishop of Dromore, owes his well-deserved popular reputation to nothing else than his industry, talent, and good taste in editing the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Old Heroic Ballads.