No More Learning

'
In the two famous writers in whom the reformation of English
verse first distinctly appears, the reforming influences—or, to speak
with stricter correctness, the models chosen in order to help the
achievement of reformare, without doubt, Italian, though French
may have had some subsidiary or go-between influence. Sonnet
and terza rima in Wyatt, and the same with the addition of blank
verse in Surrey (putting aside lyrics), tell the tale unmistakably.
And it is to be noticed that sonnet, terza rima and blank verse-
the first two by their actually strict and rigid outline and the third
through the fear and caution imposed on the writer by the absence
of his usual mentor, rime, act almost automatically. But (and it
is a precious piece of evidence in regard to their erring prede-
cessors as well as to their penitent and reformed selves) it is quite
clear that even they still have great difficulty in adjusting rhythm
to pronunciation. They wrench accent' in the fashion which
'
Gascoigne was to rebuke in the next (almost in the same) generation;
they dislocate rime; they have occasional recourse to the valued -e
which we know to have been long obsolete, and even to have turned
in some cases to the -y form in adjectives.
Whatever their shortcomings, however (and, in fact, their short-
comings were much less than might have been expected), there is
no doubt that the two poets whose names have long been and
must always be inseparable deserve, in prosody even more than
in poetry generally, the credit of a great instauration'-of show-
ing how the old patterns of Chaucer and others, adjusted to the
new pronunciation, could be got out of the disarray into which
they had fallen, by reference immediately) to Italian models.
Nor is it superfluous to point out that Italian, though apparently
a language most different in vocalisation and cadence from English,
has the very point in common with us which French lacks—the
combination, that is to say, of strict, elaborate and most various
6
6


## p. 283 (#305) ############################################

The Reformers
283
external conformation of stanza with a good deal of syllabic
liberty inside the line. These two things were exactly what
wanted encouragement in English: and Italian, gave them
together.
For the moment, however, and naturally, the stricter side of
the teaching was more attended to than the looser. The older
prosody, at an exceedingly uncertain time but, most probably, on
the bridge of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had produced
some very lovely things : not only the three above mentioned
(of which only The Nut Brown Maid can be later than the
middle of the fifteenth century, and that may not be) but others
certainly early, such as E. 1. O. , Quia amore langueo and many
less known pieces. But doggerel had invaded lyric too, and sunk
it to merely popular uses; and it would be difficult to pick out
a really beautiful lyric that is certainly of the last generation
of the fifteenth or the first of the sixteenth century. Here, there-
fore, as elsewhere, the reform had to be rather in the precise
direction; and for at least fifty years from Wyatt (who must have
begun writing as early as 1530) to Spenser, English lyric, like
English poetry generally, is 'on its good behaviour': careful of
syllabic exactness within and correspondence without; afraid of
trisyllabic liberty; obviously nervous and ‘keeping its foot,' lest
it slip back into the quicksand of doggerel or the quagmire of
scarcely rhythmed prose.
To say this is by no means (as some seem rather uncritically
to interpret it) to speak disobligingly of the lesser contributors to
Tottel's Miscellany, of Turbervile, of Gascoigne, or even of Googe,
though in all these (especially in the first mentioned group and the
last mentioned individual) exactness is too often secured by sing-
song and jog-trot. Certainly it is not to belittle the work of Wyatt
and Surrey and Sackville, though, in the first two of these, especially
in their poulter's measure,' sing-song and jog-trot do appear. The
fact is that the business of this generation-almost of these two
generations-was to get things ready for their successors to make
a new raising of English prosody to its highest power possible in
the hands of Spenser and Shakespeare, by once more thoroughly
stamping it with rhythm. Chaucer had done this, but the material
had given way; and, in doing so, it had cast an obsolete air on the
forms themselves. Thus, even the magnificent rime royal of Sack-
ville, full of the new and truly Elizabethan spirit as it is, has a sort
of archaic and artificial air at times, the air of something that, if it
were less magnificent, might be called pastiche. And nobody until


## p. 284 (#306) ############################################

284 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
Spenser himself and not the earliest Spenser-writes good 'riding
rime. ' But they exercise themselves in the regular fourteener,
split and coupleted or sandwiched with alexandrines, as if this
return to almost the oldest of English metres was instinctively
felt to have some exercising and energising quality. And they
practise, sometimes, very prettily and always very carefully, divers
lyrical measures of good gymnastic power. The sonnet is too high
for most of them, after the original adventurers: it will have to
wait a little. But blank verse, handled in a stiff and gingerly
manner, is still now and then practised, especially by that great
experimenter and systematic prosodist Gascoigne. Some of them,
especially Turbervile, can get a good deal of sweetness out of
variegated rime.
In one department only, by a singular contrast, does anarchy
hold its ground almost to the last: and that is the drama. The
fact can hardly be quite unconnected with the other fact that the
pure medieval drama had been rather remarkable for prosodic
elaboration and correctness, its vehicles being, in the main, either
fair octosyllabic couplets or more or less complicated lyrical
stanzas often quite exact in construction and correspondence.
But doggerel had broken in early and was, no doubt, encouraged
by the matter of moralities and interludes, when these came to
take the place of the miracle plays. At any rate, by the end
of the fifteenth century and throughout the first two-thirds,
if not the first three-fourths, of the sixteenth, the drama was
simply overrun with doggerel-doggerel of all sorts and shapes
and sizes. Yet, even here, the tendency to get out of the welter
at last made itself felt. First, the doggerel tried to collect and
solidify itself back into the fourteener from which it had, in a
manner, 'deliquesced. ' Then it tried couplet or stanza in deca-
syllables. · And then, the stern standard of the Gorboduc blanks
at last reared itself, too stern and too stiff to draw many followers
round it at first, but destined to undergo transformation till it
became one of the most wonderful of metres past, present, or even,
perhaps, to come—the rimeless, rhythmful, Protean-Herculean
blank verse of Shakespeare.
But we are less concerned here with the fortunes of particular
metres, or particular styles, than with the general progress of
English prosody. This—at a period the signpost to which is the
publication of The Shepheards Calender but the influences and
attainments of which are not, of course, limited to a single book
or a single person—had reached one of its most important stages,


## p. 285 (#307) ############################################

The Shepheards Calender
285
a stage unparalleled in importance except by those similarly
indicated in The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost. During
the fifteenth century, it had been almost unmade from some points
of view; but invaluable assistances for the remaking had been
accumulated in all sorts of byeways. In the two middle quarters
of the sixteenth, it had been almost remade-in the sense that the
presence of general rhythm had been restored in accordance with
actual pronunciation; and that, as one school of prosodists would
say, stressed and unstressed, accented and unaccented syllables,
had been taught to observe more orderly and proportional arrange-
ment: as another, that metrical scansion by feet had been once
more vindicated and regimented. But, during these two genera-
tions of reforming experiment, there had been comparatively few
poets of distinguished genius : of those who possessed it, Wyatt
and Surrey came a little too early, Sackville practised on too small
a scale and in too few varieties. Nay, the very fact of reforming
and innovating experiment necessitated a period of go-cart and
then, as it were, one of marking time.
But, by 1580, or a little earlier, both these periods were over,
and the flock of singers of the great Elizabethan time found that
they had been relieved of the preliminary drill. Even the classical
metre craze-threatening as it might seem to be to English poetry
and prosody_did good, not merely by showing what is not the way,
but by emphasising the most important characteristic of what is:
that is to say, the composition of the line, not by a muddle of
promiscuous syllables, but by constituents themselves regularly
and systematically composed and constituted. Even the ‘wooden-
ness of blank verse at first forces the ear to attend to the order
and position of the stresses, to the existence and conformation of
the feet. The jog-trot of the fourteeners and the 'poulter's measure'
says the same thing heavily, as do the varied lyrical forms of
Gascoigne and Turbervile not so heavily; nay, the so-called
doggerel of Tusser (which is only doggerel in phrase and subject
and spirit, for its form is quite regular) says nothing else. Whether
it canters or trots, it may now seem to some ears to run 'mind
your feet' and, to others, 'mind your stress’; but the difference
is here merely logomachic. They heard it then-into whatever
words they translated it and they went and did it.
It may seem that the selection of Spenser to show exactly
what this stage signifies is unjust to others. Certainly, if mis-
understood, it would be so. It is as nearly certain as anything
.
can be that Sidney and others did not learn their prosody from


## p. 286 (#308) ############################################

286 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
Spenser, and that even Drayton and other men, who lived and
wrote far into the seventeenth century, were, in a sense, rather his
junior schoolfellows than his pupils. But his direct influence soon
became immense and all-pervading, and, as an early and masterly
representative of influences that others were feeling, there is no
one to match him. The prosodic lessons of The Shepheards Calender
are all but unmistakable. On one point only is difference of
opinion of an important kind possible—whether the famous loose
metre of February and two other months is definite Genesis and
E. codus or Christabel (to look before and after) four-stress' or
‘iambic' with trisyllabic substitution permitted-or whether it is
an attempt at Chaucerian “five-stress' or 'heroic. ' The present
writer has not the slightest doubt on the subject : but others have.
Omitting this, every metre in the Calender, and every one sub-
sequently tried by its author, though it may be differently named
by different systems, is, with the proper translations of terminology,
unmistakable. In the various forms of identical stanza, from the
sizain through the septet and octave to his own special creation;
in the sonnet; in the still larger strophes of his odes; in the more
variegated lyrical outlines of some of the Calender poems; in the
riding rime (here quite unmistakable) of Mother Hubberd's Tale-
the exact and regular accentuation or quantification of each scheme
is unerringly observed. That great bone of contention, the 'tri-
syllabic foot,' in metre not based trisyllabically, makes compara-
tively rare appearance in him; the believers in 'slur' or 'elision'
seldom have to resort to either expedient. There are a very few
possible alexandrines (outside the last line) in The Faerie Queene;
but they are probably, or certainly, oversights. He fingers this
regularly rhythmical line, whatever its length, into the widest
variety by altering the pauses and weighting or lightening special
places with chosen phrase. He runs the lines into one another, or
holds them apart within the stanza, inexhaustibly. But, on the
whole, despite his great variety of outline and combined form, he
is once more a prophet and a practitioner of regularity—of order-
of unbroken, uneccentric, music and rhythm. This is his mission
in prosody—to make, so far as his example can reach, a gallimaufry
and jumble of mixed and jolting cadences impossible or intolerable
in English. His very abandonment of the promising, and, as it
afterwards turned out, inestimable, 'Oak and Brier' measure, is,
on one theory of that measure, just as much as on another,
evidence of a final dislike to even the possibility of such jumble
and jolt.
>


## p. 287 (#309) ############################################

Spenser's Mission
287
To, and with, one great measure, Spenser (except doubtfully
and in his earliest youth) did nothing; and it was as well that he
did nothing. Nor is this yet the place in which to take any general
survey of the features and progress of blank verse; for, though
they had, by the end of the queen's reign, reached almost, or quite,
their highest, it was as part of a movement which was still moving
and which certainly could not yet be said to be moving downward.
But the reason why it was well that Spenser took no part in this
is that his mission was, as has been said, essentially a mission,
though not of cramp or fetter, of order and regularity. Now,
blank verse did not require such a missioner then. It had started,
in the first ardour of the movement against doggerel, with severe
practice and example on the part of Surrey and, later, of Sackville.
What it wanted, and what it received, was experiment and explora-
tion of the most varied and daring kind, in all its own possible
licences and transformations. Spenser, be it repeated, was not the
man to do anything of that kind for it; and the two wisely let each
other alone.
Even in regard to blank verse, however, the Spenserian lesson
must have been of inestimable service. It is hardly excessive or
fanciful to regard him, not merely as one of the greatest and one
of the very first of Elizabethan composers, but as the greatest and
the first of Elizabethan conductors, an impeccable master of rhythm,
time and tune. This was what English poetry had wanted for
nearly two hundred years and had now got. The ear was taught
and the correspondence between ear and tongue was established.
Nor—with a pretty large exception in regard to blank verse,
where Spenser's baton was quiet, in the mid-seventeenth century,
and something of one in regard to the looser form of heroic couplet
about the same time-were these great gains ever let slip. Their
exercise, indeed, was, later, confined and hampered unduly; but
its principle was not controverted. In Edward VI's time, this
general system of rhythm, time and tune had but just been
tentatively and imperfectly attained by Wyatt and Surrey; there
has not been any general change in it from Spenser's period to the
time of Edward VII. A few words have changed their usual
accent and Spenser's peculiar system of 'eye-rime' has made it
desirable to keep his spelling, lest we destroy an effect which he
wished to produce. But, whatever you do with the spelling, you
will not alter the rhythm; whereas, if you modernise Chaucer, you
must either put continual new patches and pieces into the verse
or lose the rhythm altogether. Words may fall out, and words


## p. 288 (#310) ############################################

288 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
may come in, but the latter find, as the former leave, a fixed
system of prosodic arrangement to which they have but to adjust
themselves. Ben Jonson may have been right or wrong in saying
that Spenser writ no language,' while he certainly was wrong in
assigning mere ‘imitation of the ancients' as the cause thereof.
But, though he did not—it is said-like the Spenserian stanza,
his own more authentic and half-casual selection of Spenser as the
antithesis to 'the Water poet' shows us that he did not go wrong on
his poetic powers. Amongst the evidences of those powers it would
be ridiculous to say to-day that Spenser discovered the rhythmical-
metrical system of English poetry; and it would be unjust to say that
he alone rediscovered and adjusted it to existing circumstances.
But he was among the rediscoverers: and the greatest of them up
to his own time. In all matters of English prosody, except blank
verse and the trisyllabically based measures, we may go back to
Spenser and to his generation for example and practical precept;
and it will always be possible so to go back until the language
undergoes some transformation of which there is not at present
even the faintest symptom.


## p. 289 (#311) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM
It is, perhaps, only after long and thorough reading of Middle
English literature that the student becomes aware how completely
absent from it is the spirit of literary criticism. Not, of course,
that, in this respect, it differs very much from its continental con-
temporaries, but that the absence is, perhaps, more complete-at
any rate longer lasting—than with any of them. Almost the first
utterance that belongs even to the precincts and outskirts of the
critical province is Robert Mannyng's statement in the prologue
of his Chronicle, c. 1330) of his reason for preferring one metre to
another, which is merely that it was more likely to be appreciated.
The unknown annotator who observed that Cursor Mundi is the
best book of all' was certainly not thinking of its literary merits.
Here, as elsewhere, the first real signs of advance are found in
Chaucer ; but Chaucer's criticism, though, probably, no one was
ever born with more of the critical spirit, is mainly implicit and
undeveloped. Yet the presence of it is unmistakable, not merely in
his remarks on his own prosody, not merely in the host's on Sir
Thopas, not merely in Sir Thopas itself and in the way in which
the company fall upon the luckless monk, but in many slighter
symptoms. Indeed, it may be said that the first definite sign of the
awakening of the critical instinct in English writers, other than
Chaucer, is in their admiration for Chaucer himself. It is true
that this admiration had singular yokefellows; but that is quite
natural. Even as you must walk before you run, and totter before
you walk, so must criticism itself, at the first, be uncritical.
The first body of critical observations in English is, probably,
to be found in the prefaces of Caxton ; and a very interesting,
though a rather infantine, body it is. His very earliest work, the
translation of the Recuyell, is dictated to him by his sense of 'the
fair language of French, which was in prose so well and com-
pendiously set and written. ' He afterwards ‘remembers himself
of his simpleness and unperfectness' in both languages. He
perceives, in reference to the Dictes of the Philosophers, that lord
19
E. L. III.
CH, XIV.


## p. 290 (#312) ############################################

290
Elizabethan Criticism
Rivers's translation is right well and cunningly made. ' He sees
that, though Boethius was 'an excellent author of divers books
craftily and curiously made in prose and metre,' yet the style of
De Consolatione is 'hard and difficult,' so that Chaucer deserved
“perpetual laud' for translating it. Benet Burgh has 'full
craftily made' Cato in 'ballad royal. ' And the praises of The
Canterbury Tales and of the Morte d'Arthur, more elaborate
than these, but also much better known, might be called the first
real 'appreciations' in English.
These elementary and half unconscious critical exercises of
Caxton, as a moment's thought will show, must have had a great
influence, exercised, no doubt, as unconsciously as it was generated,
on the new readers of these new printed books. Yet it was long
before the seed fell into a soil where it could germinate. Even
when, at the beginning of the next century, regular Rhetorics
began to be written at first hand in imitation of the ancients, or
through modern humanists like Melanchthon (the earliest instance,
apparently, is that of Leonard Coxe of Reading, in 1524), the
temptation to stray from strictly formal rhetoric into criticism was
not much felt until there arose at Cambridge, towards the middle
of the century, that remarkable school of friends who are represented
in the history of English prose by Ascham, Cheke and Wilson, and
whose share in the revival of letters is dealt with elsewhere in the
present volume? Even then, on the eve of Elizabeth's reign, and
with the new burst of Italian critical writing begun by Trissino,
Daniello and Vida, the critical utterances are scanty, quite unsys-
tematic and shot (as one of the three would have said) 'at rovers. '
The really best work of the trio in this kind is Cheke's, who, if he
was mistaken in his caution to Sir Thomas Hoby against the practice
of borrowing from ancient tongues in modern”, has left us, in the
criticism on Sallust quoted by Ascham, a really solid exercise in
the art: not, of course, absolutely right-few things are that in
criticism-but putting one side of rightness forcibly and well,
in his depreciation (as Quintilian, doubtless his inspirer, has put
it) of 'wishing to write better than you can. ' It may, however,
be noted that all the three set themselves against over-elaboration
of style in this way or that. It was this which provoked Thomas
Wilson (whom we may not now, it seems, call 'Sir' Thomas) to
diverge from the usual course of rhetorical precept, not merely
into some illustrative tales, but into a definite onslaught on ‘ink-
horn' terms—foreign, archaic, technical or what not. It is not
1 See chaps. I and XIX.
: See chap. XIX.
>


## p. 291 (#313) ############################################

Ascham
291
known exactly who first hit on this phrase, the metaphor of which
is sufficiently obvious; but it is freely used about this time. And
we can quite easily see how the 'aureate' phraseology of the
fifteenth century—the heavy bedisenment of Latinised phrase,
which we find not merely in poetry but in such books as the early
English version of Thomas à Kempis—must have challenged
opposition on the part of those who were anxious, indeed, to follow
the classics for good, but desirous, at the same time, that 'our
English’should be written ‘pure. ' And the contemporary jealousy
and contempt of the medieval appears not less clearly in Wilson's
objection to the Chaucerising which Thynne's edition, evidently, had
made fashionable.
The strengthening power of the critical sense, however, and, at
the same time, its lack of education and direction, are best shown
in Ascham. It is something, but not much, that he exhibits to the
full that curious confusion of aesthetic and ethic which, essentially
Platonic and patristic, cannot be said to have been wholly dis-
couraged by Aristotle, and which the period, uniting, for once,
the three tendencies, maintained, almost in the teeth of its own
humanism, more strenuously than ever. This confusion, or-to
—
adopt a less question-begging word—this combination, has always
had, has and, no doubt, always will have, its defenders : nor is it a
bad thing that they should exist, as protesters against the too
absolute doctrine of 'art for art only. ' But Ascham's inability to
apply the strictly critical distinguo extends far beyond the con-
demnation of romance as suggesting the violation of the sixth and
seventh commandments, or the discouragement of the importation
of foreign literature as involving that of foreign immorality, or (this
is Cheke, not Ascham, but Ascham approves it) the urging of
Sallust's laxity of conduct as an argument against his literary
competence. It is not shown in the unceasing opposition of the
whole trio to‘aureate' and `inkhorn' terms, an opposition which
may, indeed, have been excessive, but which cannot be said to have
been misplaced, when such a man as Hawes, not so many years
earlier, could be guilty of two such consecutive lines as
Degouted vapoure most aromatyke,
And made conversyon of complacence.
It appears mainly, and most dangerously, in Ascham's doctrine
of Imitation. Of this imitation, he distinguishes two kinds (liter-
ally, three, but, as he himself says, 'the third belongeth to the
second'). The first of these is the original mimesis of Aristotle :
19-2


## p. 292 (#314) ############################################

292
Elizabethan Criticism
6
'a fair lively painted picture of the life of every degree of man. '
The second is 'to follow, for learning of tongues and sciences, the
best authors. ' But he expressly limits the first kind to comedy
and tragedy, and says that ‘it doth not much belong at this time
to our purpose. ' It is the second kind, not so much the repre-
sentation of nature as the actual copying of the existing art of
man, to which he devotes his whole attention, in which he obviously
feels his whole interest. If he does not, like Vida, say, in so many
words, 'steal from’ the ancients, he has, practically, nothing more
to urge than 'follow' them, and ‘borrow from’ them. In some
respects, and to some extent, he could, of course, have said nothing
better. But, in respect of one point, and that the chief one which
gives him a position in English criticism, his following was most
corrupt. After the matter had long remained in some obscurity,
it has been shown pretty exactly how the idea came about
that English verse needed reforming on classical patterns.
Chaucerian prosody, to some extent in the hands of Chaucer's own
contemporaries like Lydgate and Occleve, but, still more, in those
of his and their successors, had fallen into such utter disarray that,
in many cases, little but the rime ("and that's not much ') remained
to distinguish verse from prose. In Ascham's own day, the very
worst of this tyranny was, indeed, past; and the apparent reor-
ganising of pronunciation on the basis of dropping the value of
the final -e, and other changes, had restored a certain order to
verse. But the favourite 'fourteener' (Ascham expressly smites
'the rash ignorant heads that can easily reckon up fourteen
syllables') was still, for the most part, a shambling, slovenly,
sing-song, with nothing of the fire which Chapman afterwards
infused into its unbroken form, or of the ineffable sweetness which
the seventeenth century lyrists extracted from the divided couplet.
On the other hand, the euphony of Greek and Latin metres was
universally recognised. Why not imitate them also ? The possibility
and propriety of this imitation (recommended, no doubt, by the fact
that, dangerous error though, on the whole, it was, it had more than
a grain of truth at the bottom of it, as regards feet, though not as
regards metres) seems to have arisen at Cambridge, likewise, and
at St John's College, but not with one of the three scholars just
mentioned. The chief begetter of it appears to have been Thomas
Watson, master of the college, afterwards bishop of Lincoln, and a
man who did not succeed in playing the difficult game between
papist and protestant with such success as Ascham and Wilson.
Ascham himself has preserved with approval the remarkably, but


## p. 293 (#315) ############################################

Ascham on Versing'
•
293
not extraordinarily, bad hexameters in which Watson puts into
English the first two lines of the Odyssey,
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses
For that he knew many mens manners and saw many cities,
and, in more places than one, he denounces rude beggarly
riming' not (as he might have done with some colour) in
favour of the new blank verse actually started by Surrey long
before he wrote, but in favour of classical 'versing. From his
time this became, with another less technical one, the main
question of Elizabethan criticism, and we may despatch it before
turning to the less technical question, and to others. We do not
know exactly at what time Watson began to recommend and attempt
English hexameters; but it must have been almost certainly before
1554, when both he and Ascham left Cambridge. And it may have
been any time earlier, as far back as 1535, which seems to have
been the first year that he, Ascham and Cheke (to whose conver-
sations on this subject, and on others connected with it, Ascham
often refers) were at the university together. It is more likely
to have been late than early. At any rate, the idea took root
in St John's and, somewhat later still (probably between 1561 and
1569), produced the celebrated and mysterious rules of Thomas
Drant, another fellow of the college. These rules are repeatedly
referred to in the correspondence beween Harvey and Spenser to be
noticed presently, though Harvey, with his usual bluster, disclaims
all knowledge of them. Ascham himself is really our earliest
authority on the subject, and seems (from Nashe’s references,
for instance) to have been practically recognised as such even then.
To do him justice, however, his affection for 'versing' appears
to have been much more lukewarm than his dislike of rime. If,
when he cites Watson's doggerel, he commits himself to the
statement that 'our English tongue may as well receive right
quantity of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek
or Latin,' he makes exceedingly damaging admissions afterwards,
as that ‘our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of
Carmen Heroicum because the dactylus, the aptest foot for that
verse, is seldom found, and that the said carmen 'doth rather
trot and hobble than run smoothly in English. ' He makes himself
amends, however, by scolding rime with a curious pedantic pettish-
ness; and by advancing the notable argument that, whosoever is
>
6
1 Not now known to be extant, and nowhere stated with any precision by Spenser
himselt.


## p. 294 (#316) ############################################

294
Elizabethan Criticism
angry with him for misliking rime may be angry with Quintilian
for misliking it. This remark is, of course, of the highest value as
showing how far from any true critical point of view a man, always
a good scholar and, generally, a man of good sense, could find
himself at this time. Nor is there less instruction in the other
fact that, while he is aware of Surrey's blank verse, and though it
discards his bugbear rime, he is not in the least satisfied with it,
because it has not true quantity. Now, as Surrey's blank verse,
though not very free or flexible, is, as a rule, correct enough in
accent-quantity, it is clear that Ascham was woolgathering after a
system of 'quantity by position,' quantity, as opposed to accent,
and the like, which never has been, and is never likely to be,
established in English. This 'true' quantity is, in fact, the key of
the whole position, and the quest for it occupies all the acuter
minds among the earlier disputants on the subject. Ascham, while
hopeful, makes no serious effort to discover it, though his con-
fession about Watson's hexameters and those of others amounts to
a confession that it had not been discovered. Spenser and Harvey,
in their correspondence, do not so much quarrel as amicably
'wrangle,' in the technical sense, over the difficulties of quantity
by position. Can you possibly pronounce or, without pronouncing,
value for prosodic purposes 'carpenter' as 'carpenter'? May
you, while retaining the short pronunciation, but availing yourself
of the long accent of 'mother' in its first syllable, make the short
second syllable long before a consonant in the next word?
Although Spenser, in his letters, nowhere acknowledges the im-
possibility of these tricks with words, his entire abandonment of
this kind of versing in his mature work speaks more eloquently
than any formal abjuration. As for Harvey, the sort of boisterous
pedantry with which he seems to think it proper to suffuse his
writing makes it very difficult to judge how far he is serious.
But the verse (of which, apparently, he thought well enough to
repeat it three times)
O blessëd Virtue! blessëd Fame! blessed Abundance!
is sufficient to show that he did believe in quantity by position,
inasmuch as 'blessed,' in the first two cases, before consonants, be-
comes 'blessed,' and in the third, before a vowel, remains 'blessed. '
But he is simply grotesque in many of his examples; and it is
difficult not to believe them caricatures or partly so, though it is
true that Spenser himself, master of harmony as he was in the true
measures, and a very serious person, is nearly as much a doggerelist
as others in these false measures.
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## p. 295 (#317) ############################################

6
>
Stanyhurst
295
Webbe, Puttenham and others to be mentioned presently
engage in this question-Puttenham slightly, Webbe with a
blundering eagerness--and it continues to be discussed at intervals
till it is fought out by Campion and Daniel. But the most intelli-
gent and the most illuminative of the earlier remarks on it come
from one of the wildest of the practitioners, Richard Stanyhurst.
For his wildness lies not so much in his prosody, as in his diction,
where he wilfully hampers himself by making it his principle to
use no word that had been used by his predecessor Phaer. As a
critic of prosody, he is a curious mixture of sense and crotchet.
He sees, and insists upon, the undoubted, and generally overlooked,
truth that many important monosyllables in English, 'me,' 'my,'
the,' 'and,' etc. , are common : but he wishes to indicate the
double pronunciation which, in effect, proves this, by spelling
'mee' and 'thee,' in the latter case introducing a gratuitous
confusion with the pronoun. He follows, as a rule, Latin quantity
in English, thus making 'honour' short, in spite of the accent,
and 'mother' (which he spells 'moother ') long, because of mater.
He admits quantity by position, but, apparently, not in middle
syllables; and, properly recognising the English tendency to carry
back the accent, wants to make this uniform to the extent of
'imperative' and 'orthography. Lastly, he has a most singular
system of deciding the quantity of final syllables, not by the last
vowel, but by the last consonant, whereby he is driven to make
endless exceptions, and a large number of common’ endings.
In fact, the main value of Stanyhurst is that the prevalence of the
common syllable in English is, really, at the bottom of all his
theory. But the question could never be properly cleared up on
these lines, and it remained in a state of theoretical unsettlement,
and of occasional tentative, but always unsuccessful, practice till it
was settled in the way mentioned above, and to be described below.
It is curious that Milton makes no reference to it in the after-
thought outburst against rime which he subjoined to the later
copies of Paradise Lost. It would have been extremely interest-
ing to have heard his deliberate opinion, at any rate of Campion.
The other main question, or, rather, group of questions, to which
the criticism of what we have yet to speak of was devoted, con-
cerns the general character and status of poetry at large, or, at
least, the general rules of certain important poetical kinds. These
matters had been eagerly and constantly discussed abroad during
the middle of the century, in fact during nearly the whole of its two
inner quarters, when most of the authors mentioned in the present
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## p. 296 (#318) ############################################

296 Elizabethan Criticism
chapter began to write. There was even a considerable stock of
Italian and Latin critical writing on the question, which was soon
to be supplemented in French, when Ascham himself turned his
attention to the matter.
These discussions turned, on one side, on
the Platonic distrust, largely altered and dosed with the puritan
dislike, of poetry, as such, and especially of dramatic poetry; and,
on another side, on the proper laws, more particularly of the drama,
but also of other poetic kinds. As for real historical criticism, for
the examination of English poetry as it was, in order to discover
what it ought to be, circumstances were not favourable; but some
attempts were made even in this line. On the whole, it will
be most profitable, having thus given the general conditions and
directions, to consider in order the actual exponents and docu-
ments of the subject. Of Ascham and his group it is probably not
necessary to say more. The direction to the subject which they
gave was invaluable, but their actual utterances on it could not
but be somewhat sporadic and haphazard. In particular, few of
them were, or could even be expected to be, devoted to English
literature as it was. General principles of a pedagogic kind,
almost always coming round to the imitation of the ancients, were
what they could give, and, perhaps, what it was best for them
to give.
The first remarks of a critical kind upon English verse may be
found, unexpectedly enough, in the dry desert of A Mirror for
Magistrates', among the intermixed conversations of the earlier
part. And, some years later, the first wholly and really critical
tractate devoted to English letters is again prosodic. This is the
somewhat famous Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the
making of verse or ryme in English, written at the request of Master
Eduardo Donati by George Gascoigne. It may have been, to some
extent, suggested by Ronsard's ten years earlier Abrégé de l'art
Poétique Français, but, if so, there is nothing in it of the awkward
and irrelevant transference to one matter of observations originally
made on matter quite different, which sometimes occurs in such cases.
Indeed, the first point of likeness—that both insist upon 'some
fine invention' (le principal point est l'invention)—is publica
materies from the ancients. And Gascoigne's genuine absorption
in his actual subject appears by his early reference to alliterative
poetry in the very words of Chaucer's parson: ‘to thunder in Rym,
Ram, Ruff, by letter (quoth my master Chaucer). ' Nor does he
a
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## p. 297 (#319) ############################################

Gascoigne
297
waste much time in generalities, though those which he has are
well to the point, as in the remark 'If I should undertake to write
in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye
nor her cherry lip, etc. For these are trita et obvia. Nay, he even
anticipates Wordsworth’s heroic petitio principii by saying that
invention being found, pleasant words will follow well enough
and fast enough. A brief caution against obscurity leads to an
advice to keep just measure, 'hold the same measure wher-
with you begin,' for the apparent obviousness of which he
apologises, observing, with only too much reason, that it was
constantly neglected. A further caution, equally obvious and
equally necessary, follows, on keeping natural emphasis or sound,
using every word as it is commonly pronounced or used-a caution
which, it is hardly necessary to say, was needed even by such a poet
as Wyatt, was not quite superfluous long after Gascoigne's time
and would, if observed, have killed the classical 'versing,' which
Gascoigne nowhere notices save by innuendo, in its cradle.
But it is immediately after, and in connection with, this, that
the most interesting and important point in the whole treatise
appears, in a statement which helps us to understand, if not to
accept, an impression which evidently held its ground in English
poetical theory for the best part of two centuries and more. It is
that 'commonly now a dayes in English rimes' (for, though he does
not recommend 'versing,' he ‘dare not call them English verses')
we use none other order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the
first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made
long,' i. e. the iamb. “We have,' he says, “used in times past other
kinds of metres,' quoting an anapaestic line; and he makes the very
remarkable statement that our father Chaucer hath used the
same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use. ' He,
apparently, laments the limitation, but says we must take the
ford as we find it,' and again insists that no word is to be
wrested 'from his natural and usual sound,' illustrating his posi-
tion. He deprecates the use of polysyllables as un-English and
unpleasant; of rime without reason; of unusual words, save with
discretion,' in order to draw attentive reading'; of too great
insecurity and too great facility; of unnatural inversion. But he
allows that ‘shrewd fellow . . . poetical license. These things, though
in most, but not all, cases right and sensible and quite novel
from an English pen, are almost trivial. Not so his pronounce-
ment on pauses—rests' or 'ceasures. ' He admits these to be 'at
discretion,' especially in rime royal, but again exhibits the stream
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## p. 298 (#320) ############################################

298 Elizabethan Criticism
of tendency in the most invaluable manner, by prescribing, as best,
the middle syllable in octosyllables and alexandrines, the fourth
in decasyllables and the eighth in fourteeners. The term rime
royal reminds him that he should explain it and other techni-
calities, which he proceeds to do, including in his explanation
the somewhat famous term 'poulter's measure' for the couplet
of alexandrine and fourteener popular in the mid-sixteenth
century. And he had forgotten 'a notable kind of ryme, called
ryding ryme, such as our Mayster and Father Chaucer used in
his Canterburie tales. ' It is, he thinks, most apt for a merry tale,
rime royal for a grave discourse. And so, judiciously relegating
‘poulter's measure' by a kind of afterthought to psalms and
hymns, he ends the first, one of the shortest but, taking it
altogether, one of the most sensible and soundest, of all tractates
on prosody in English and one of our first documents in criticism
generally. Incidentally, it supplies us with some important his-
torical facts as to language, such as that 'treasure' was not
pronounced 'treasure,' that to make a dissyllable of 'Heaven'
was a licence-Mitford, two centuries later, thought the mono-
syllabic pronunciation vulgar and almost impossible--and the like.
It is very difficult to exaggerate the importance of the
appearance in this work—the first prosodic treatise in English,
and one written just on the eve of the great Elizabethan period—
of the distinct admission, all the more distinct because of its
obvious reluctance, that the iamb is the only foot in English
serious rime, and of the preference for middle caesuras. As
symptoms, these things show us the not unnatural recoil and re-
action from the prosodic disorderliness of the fifteenth century and
the earliest part of the sixteenth, just as Gascoigne's protests against
wrenching accent show the sense of dissatisfaction even with the
much improved rhythm of Wyatt and Surrey. But they also fore-
cast, in the most noteworthy fashion, the whole tendency towards
a closely restricted syllabic and rhythmical uniformity which, after
several breakings-away, resulted in the long supremacy of the
stopped, centrally divided, decasyllabic couplet as the metre of
metres, from which, or compared with which, all others were de-
clensions and licences. The reader may be reminded that, even
before Gascoigne, there are interesting, and not much noticed,
evidences of the same revulsion from irregular metres in the prose
inter-chapters of A Mirror for Magistrates.
Gascoigne, however, had been purely prosodic; the current of
Elizabethan criticism, increasing very largely in volume shortly


## p. 299 (#321) ############################################

Sidney
299
after his time, took a different direction, except in so far as it
still now and then dealt with the delusion of classical 'versing. '
George Whetstone, in his dedication of Promos and Cassandra
(1578), touched, briefly, on the disorderliness of the English stage,
and its contempt alike of unity and probability. But, immediately
after this, a quarrel, half critical, half ethical, arose over the
subject of drama and poetry generally, a quarrel which is the first
thing of the kind in English literary history and which enriched
English criticism with its first work of distinct literary importance
for authorship, range and quality. The challenge of this quarrel
was Stephen Gosson's famous School of Abuse (1579) with its
appendix of pamphlets; the chief feat of arms in it was Sir Philip
Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie or Defence of Poesie (not printed
till 1595 but certainly written before 1583). Gosson had dedicated
his work to Sidney; and Sir Philip, showing a sense of literary
manners which, unfortunately, has never been too common, abstains
from replying directly to his dedicator, though his whole argument
is destructive of Gosson's. Others were less scrupulous, and, indeed,
had less reason for scruple; and Thomas Lodge, in a pamphlet the
exact title of which is lost, takes up the cudgel in all but the full
tone of Elizabethan 'flyting. This reply, however, as well as
Gosson's original attack and its sequels, has very little really
literary criticism in it. Gosson, himself a playwright for some
time, seems to have been suddenly convinced, probably by a con-
version to puritanism, of the sinfulness of poetry generally, and
the line of stricture which he takes is almost wholly moral; while,
not unnaturally, he is followed, for the most part, in this line, by
Lodge who, however, indulges in a certain amount of rather con-
fused comment and eulogium on the classics. In the time and
circumstances it was certain that Sidney would, to some exten
do the same; his strain, however, is not only of a much higher
mood but also of a wider and a more varied.
Beginning, with a touch of humour, on the tendency of every-
body to extol his own vocation, he plunges, almost at once, into
the stock defence of poetry: from its age and the wonders ascribed
to it of old; its connection with philosophy; the way in which
Plato is poetical even in his onslaughts upon it; its time-honoured
and world-spread vogue; the high and incomparable titles of
'poietes,' 'vates,' 'maker'; its command of every kind of subject,
vying with nature in something like creation; its connection
with Divinity itself. Then he sketches its kinds, and insists upon
the poet's nobleness as against all competitors, setting him above


## p. 300 (#322) ############################################

300
Elizabethan Criticism
both philosopher and historian. Examples of excellence for
imitation, and of misdoing for avoidance, are given. The poet
has all, 'from Dante his heven to his hell,' under the authority of
his pen. After much on this, he returns to the kinds-examining
and dismissing objections to pastoral, elegy and what not. At this
point, he makes a sweep towards his special subject of drama,
but touches it lightly and goes off to the heroic, whence, his
preamble or exposition being finished, he comes to 'poet-haters,'
the name, and even the person, of Gosson being carefully left in
obscurity. He examines and dismisses once more the stock ob-
jections—waste of time, lying, encouragement of evil desires, etc.
and, of course, sets the excellence of use against the possibility
of abuse. And so, all generalities done (the famous commendation
of Chevy Chace, ‘Percy and Duglas,' has occurred long before),
he shapes his concluding course towards English poetry, to find
out why England has 'growne so hard a stepmother' towards
poets ; why there is such a cold welcome for poetry here. And,
at this point, both the most strictly genuine criticism and the
most piquant oddity of the piece begin, though it would be very
unfair to Sidney not to remember that he is writing just after
The Shepheards Calender had appeared, in the mere overture of
the great Elizabethan concert.
"The verie true cause,' he thinks, 'of our wanting estimation,
is want of desert, taking uppon us to be poets, in despite of Pallas. '
Art, imitation and exercise, as well as mother-wit, are necessary
for poetry, and English poets use neither art nor imitation rightly.
Chaucer ‘did excellently' but had great wants,' a sentence which
surprises the reader less when he finds that A Mirror for Magistrates
is 'meetly furnished of bewtiful partes. ' The Shepheards Calender
‘hath much Poetrie in his Egloges, indeed woorthie the reading. '
But Sidney 'dare not allow' the framing of even his own familiar
friend's language to a rustic style, ‘since neither Theocritus in
Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazara in Italian, did affect it. '
Besides these (he had duly praised Surrey), he 'remembers to
have seen few printed that had poetical sinews in them’ and,
looking back from 1580 to 1530, as he is evidently doing, one
cannot much wonder. Then he accumulates wrath on the infant
drama-again, be it remembered, before Peele, before Lyly, before
Marlowe, or just when their earliest work was appearing. But his
wrath is bestowed upon it for the very things that were to make
the greatness, not only of these three, but of Shakespeare and
all the rest. Our tragedies and comedies observe rules 'neither
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## p. 301 (#323) ############################################

Webbe
301
6
of honest civilitie nor skilfull Poetrie,' excepting Gorboduc, which
itself is not faultless. It is faulty in place and time: all the rest
are faulty not only in these but in action. And then we have
the often quoted passage satirising the 'free' drama in all these
respects, with a further censure of the mixture of tragedy and
comedy, and an aspiration after the limiting of comedy to Terentian-
Plautine types and of tragedy to the divine admiration' excited
by the tragedies of Buchanan. 'Our Songs and Sonets' are frigid,
etc, etc. He insinuates, rather than definitely advances, a sug-
gestion that English should use both riming and versing. And
he ends with a half-enthusiastic, half-satirical peroration on the
Planet-like Music of Poetrie. '
The quaint perversity of all this, and the still quainter revenge
which time took on it by making the next fifty years and more
a flourishing time of English poetry in almost direct consequence
of the neglect of Sidney's censures, is a commonplace. It ought
to be as much a commonplace to repeat the sufficient explanation
of it—that he lacked the basis and sine qua non of all sound
criticism, to wit, a sufficient quantity of precedent good poetry.
But, of late, considerable interest has been taken in the question
whether he got his principles from specific or general sources; and
there has been a tendency to regard him as specially echoing not
merely Scaliger but the Italian critic Minturno. There are, no
doubt, coincidences with these two, and, especially, with Minturno;
but it is the opinion of the present writer that Sidney was rather
familiar with the general drift of Italian criticism than following
any special authority.
The Discourse of English Poetrie which William Webbe, a
Cambridge graduate and private tutor in the house of an Essex
squire, published in 1586, is far below Sidney's in learning, in
literary skill and, above all, in high sympathy with the poetic
spirit. But Webbe is enthusiastic for poetry according to his
lights; he has the advantage of writing later; and his dealings
with his subject are considerably less in the air. '
He even
attempts a historical survey—the first thing that ought to have
been done and the last that actually was done-but deficiency of
information and confusion of view are wofully evident in this.
Gower is the first English poet that he has heard of; though he
admits that Chaucer may have been equal in time. But it does
not seem that he had read anything of Gower's, though that poet
was easily accessible in print. He admires Chaucer, but in a rather
suspiciously general way; thinks Lydgate comparable with him for


## p. 302 (#324) ############################################

302
Elizabethan Criticism
6
meetly good proportion of verse' and 'supposes that Piers Plough-
man was next. Of the supposed author of this poem, he makes
the strange, but very informing, remark that he is the first who
observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme. '
He knows Skelton; does not, apparently, know Wyatt; speaks
again strangely of 'the old earl of Surrey'; but, from Gascoigne
onwards, seems fairly acquainted with the first Elizabethans,
especially commending Phaer, Golding and Googe, and thinking
Anthony Munday's work very rare poetry' in giving the sweet
sobs of Shepherds, an estimate which has had much to do
with the identification of Munday and 'Shepherd Tony. But
Webbe's judgment is too uncertain to be much relied on.
Still, it must be to his eternal honour that he admires Spenser,
lavishly and ungrudgingly, while not certain that the author of
The Shepheards Calender is Spenser. He is deeply bitten with
the mania for ‘versing'; and a great part of the tractate is
occupied with advice and experiments in relation to it and with
abuse of rime. He actually tries to 'verse' some of the most
beautiful lines of the Calender itself, and hopes that Spenser and
Harvey (whom he evidently thinks Spenser's equal) will 'further
that reformed kind of poetry. ' So that, once more, though
Webbe is not to be compared with Sidney in any other way, we
find a strange and almost laughable similarity in their inability
to 'orientate' themselves—to put themselves at the real English
point of view. If one had had his way, we should have had no
Shakespeare; if the other had had his, we should never have
had the true Spenser.
Somewhat earlier than Webbe's little book there had, ap-
parently, been written, and, somewhat later (1589), there was
published, a much more elaborate Arte of English Poesie, which
is a sort of combination of a Poetic and a Rhetoric especially
copious on the subject of figures. It appeared anonymously, the
printer even saying (but this was not a very uncommon trick)
that it came into his hands without any author's name. ' That
of Puttenham was not attached to it for another quarter of a
century. Until quite recently, it has been usual to identify
the author with a certain George Puttenham. Arguments for
preferring his brother Richard were put forward so long ago as
1883, by Croft, in his edition of The Governour of Sir Thomas
Elyot, a relation of the Puttenhams; but little notice was taken
of them for a time. Of late, Richard Puttenham has been the
favourite, without, in the present writer's judgment, much cause.
6


## p. 303 (#325) ############################################

a
The Arte of English Poesie 303
The fact is that there are arguments against both the Puttenhams,
and there is little more than presumption in favour of either. The
authorship, however, is of little or no importance; the book is
a remarkable one. It is quite evidently written by a courtier,
a man of some age, who represents all but the earliest Elizabethan
generation, but one who has survived to witness the advent of
Spenser, and who is well acquainted with the as yet unpublished
work of Sidney. He has pretty wide reading, and is something
of a scholar—the extraordinary names of some of his figures are,
probably, a printer's blunder. He knows rather more about
English poetry than Webbe, for he does not omit Wyatt; but he
includes the chronicler Harding in a fashion which raises suspicions.
Still, that 'Piers Plowman's verse is but loose metre' is a distinct
improvement. Contemporaries, with the inclusion of the Queene
our Sovereign Lady,' who, of course, "easily surmounteth all the
rest,' are judged not unhappily-Sidney and that other gentle-
man who wrote the late Shepherds Calendar' being praised for
eclogue and pastoral; Ralegh’s verse receiving the memorable
phrase 'most lofty, insolent and passionate,' while the attribution
of sweet solemn and high conceit' to Dyer, of a good metre and a
plentiful vein' to Gascoigne and of ‘learned and well corrected'
verse to Phaer and Golding, is, in none of these instances, unhappy.
And the distinct recognition of Surrey and Wyatt as 'the two chief
lanterns of light to all others that have since employed their pens
in English poesy' deserves the highest praise. It is, in fact, except
the traditional and parrot-like encomia on Chaucer, the first
jalon-the first clear and firm staking out of English poetical -
history. Puttenham, however, is chiefly busy, as his title justified
him in being, with the most strictly formal side of poetry-with
its art. He will not allow feet, for a reason which, at any rate
in his own statement of it, is far from clear, but seems to have
a confused idea that individual English words are seldom complete
feet of any kind, and that we have too many monosyllables. But
he is exact in the enumeration of 'measures' by syllables, and
of 'staffs' by lines, pushing his care, in this respect, so far as to
give careful diagrams of the syllabic outline, and the rime-
connection of these latter. In fact, Puttenham is nothing if not
diagrammatic; and his leaning in this direction makes him very
complacent towards the purely artificial forms-eggs, altars,
lozenges, rhombi—which were to be the object of much ridicule.
He is also copious (though he regards it with lukewarm approval)
on classical ‘versifying'; and, in fact, spares no pains to make
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304
Elizabethan Criticism
his work a manual of practical directions for manufacturers of
verse. These directions occupy the whole of his second book-
‘of proportion' as he calls it. The third of ornament'-is almost
wholly occupied by the elaborate list of figures above referred
to. His fourth, 'of Poets and Poesy,' contains the history also
mentioned, and a good deal of stock matter as to the kinds of
poetry, its ethical position and purport, an enquiry into the origin
and history of rime (much less prejudiced and much better informed
than the strictures of the versers') and several other things.
Puttenham, it is clear, is, to some extent, hampered and led astray
by the common form and commonplace of the school rhetorics
which he is trying to adjust to English poetic; and he has the
enormous disadvantage of writing twenty years too soon. If his
Arte of Poesie could have been informed by the spirit, and en-
riched by the experience, of Daniel's Defence of Ryme, or if
Daniel had cared to extend and particularise this latter in the
manner, though not quite on the principles, of Puttenham, we
should possess a book on English prosody such as we do not yet
possess and perhaps never shall. As it is, there is a great deal
of dead wood' in the Arte. But it is none the less a document
of the highest value and interest historically, as showing the
seriousness with which the formal and theoretical side of poetry
was, at last and after almost utter'neglect, being taken in England.
It may owe something to Sidney-Gregory Smith has well ob-
served that all these critical writers, long before Sidney's tract
was published, evidently knew it in MS. But by far the greater
part of it is devoted to exactly the matters that Sidney did
not touch.
Sir John Harington, in that preface to his Ariosto which he
rightly calls, rather, a brief apology of poetry and of the author
and translator, refers directly to Sidney and, indeed, travels over
much the same ground in the general part of his paper; but he
acquires independent interest when he comes to deal with his
special subject. Indeed, one may, perhaps, say that his is the first
'critical introduction' in English, if we except ‘E. K. 's' to the
Calender. It is interesting to find him at once striking out for the
rope which, down to Addison, if not still later, the critic who felt
himself out of his depth in pure appreciation always tried to
seize—the tracing of resemblances in his author to the ancients,
in this case to Vergil. One might, indeed, be inclined to think
that, except in point of adventure, no two poets could possibly
be more unlike than the author of the Aeneid and the author of


## p. 305 (#327) ############################################

6
>
Harington and others
305
Orlando. But Sir John does not consider so curiously. There
is arma in the first line of the one and arme in the first line of
the other; one ends with the death of Turnus and the other with
that of Rodomont; there is glorification of the Julian house in
one and glorification of the house of Este in the other. In fact,
'there is nothing of any special observation in Vergil but my
author hath with great felicity imitated it. ' Now, if you imitate
Vergil, you must be right. Did not ‘that excellent Italian poet,
Dant' profess that, when he wandered out of the right way, Vergil
reclaimed him? Moreover, Ariosto 'hath followed Aristotle's
rules very strictly' and, though this assertion may almost take
the reader's breath away, Harington manages to show some case
for it in the same Fluellinian fashion of argument which has just
been set forth in relation to Vergil. Nor ought we to regard this
with any contempt. Defensible or indefensible, it was the method
of criticism which was to be preferred for the greater part of at
least two centuries. And Harington has a few remarks of interest
in regard to his own metre, rime, and such matters.
The illiberal, and, to some tastes, at any rate, rather wearisome,
'flyting' between Harvey and Nashe over the dead body of Greene
necessarily contains a large number of passages which are critical
after a fashion-indeed, the names of most writers of the strictly
Elizabethan period will be found with critical epithets or phrases
attached to them. But the whole is so thoroughly subdued to the
general tone of wrangling that any pure critical spirit is, neces-
sarily, absent. Nashe, with his usual faculty of hard hitting, says
to his foe, 'You will never leave your old tricks of drawing Master
Spenser into every piebald thing you do. ' But the fact is that
both merely use other men of letters as offensive or defensive
weapons for their own purposes.
A few, but only a few, fragments of criticism strictly or approxi-
mately Elizabethan may now be noticed. These are The Excellency
of the English Tongue by Richard Carew (1595–6 ? ), a piece in
which patriotism reinforces itself with a good amount of know-
ledge; the critical prefatory matter of Chapman's Iliad (or,
rather, its first instalments in 1598), which contains a vigorous
onslaught on Scaliger for his 'soulblind impalsied diminuation'
of Homer; Drayton's interesting prosodic note (1603) on his own
change of metre, etc. , when he rehandled Mortimeriados into The
Barons Wars (his still more interesting verse epistle to Reynolds
is much later); Meres's famous catalogue of contemporary wits
(1598), known to everyone for its references to Shakespeare, but
20
E. L. III.
CH. XIV.


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306
Elizabethan Criticism
>
6
in no part or respect discovering much critical ability ; passages
of William Vaughan (1600), Edmund Bolton and a few others.
But the last of all strictly Elizabethan discussion of matters
literary, and almost the most valuable part of it, is the notable
duel between Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel on the question
of rime.
These two tractates, entitled, respectively, Observations in the
Art of English Poesy and A defence of Ryme, appeared in the
second and, probably, the third years of the new century, and
both the attack and the defence exhibit a most noteworthy altera-
tion when we compare them with the disquisitions on 'versing'
from fifty to ten years earlier. Nothing keeps the same,' except
Campion's abuse of the rime that he had used, was using and was
to use with such charm. The earlier discussions could hardly be
called controversies, because there was practically nothing said on
behalf of rime—unless the silent consensus of all good poets in
continuing to practise it may be allowed to be more eloquent than
any positive advocacy. And nearly (not quite) the whole energy
of the attack had been employed, not merely to dethrone rime, but
to instal directly classical metres, especially hexameters and
clegiacs, in the place of it. Campion still despises rime; but he
throws the English hexameter overboard with perfect coolness,
without the slightest compunction and, indeed, with, nearly as
much contempt as he shows towards rime itself. “The Heroical
verse that is distinguished by the dactyl hath oftentimes been
attempted in our English tongue but with passing pitiful success,'
and no wonder, seeing that it is 'an attempt altogether against
the nature of our language. ' Accordingly, in the 'reformed un-
rhymed numbers' which he himself proceeds to set forth, he relies,
in the main, on iambs and trochees, though (and this is his
distinguishing characteristic and his saving merit) he admits not
merely spondees but dactyls, anapaests (rarely) and even tri-
brachs as substitutes. By the aid of these he works out eight
kinds of verse : the 'pure iambic' or decasyllabic , the 'iambic
dimeter or English march,' which, in strict classical terminology,
is an iambic (or trochaic) monometer hypercatalectic? , the
English trochaic, a trochaic decasyllables, the English elegiac,
6
>
6
1 The more secure the more the stroke we feel.
(With licence of substitution. )
2 Raving war, begot
In the thirsty sands.
3 Kate can only fancy beardless husbands.


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6
3
>
Campion. Daniel
307
an eccentric and not very harmonious combination of an ordinary
iambic decasyllable and of two of his ‘dimeters' run together,
the English sapphic”, a shortened form of this, a peculiar quintet*
and the English anacreontic5.
He ends with an attempt, as arbitrary and as unsuccessful as
Stanyhurst's, to determine the quantity of English syllables on a
general system : e. g. the last syllables of plurals, with two or more
vowels before the 8, are long, etc.
The Defence of Ryme with which Daniel replied is, time and
circumstance being duly allowed for, one of the most admirable
things of its kind in English literature. It is perfectly politea
merit not too common in criticism at any time, and particularly rare
in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Indeed, Daniel,
though it would not appear that there was personal acquaintance
between him and Campion, has the combined good taste and good
sense (for it is a powerful argument on his own side) to compliment
his adversary on his own success with rime. His erudition is not
impeccable; but it is sufficient. He devotes some, but not much,
attention to the 'eight kinds of verses, making the perfectly true,
and very damaging, observation that they are all perfectly con-
sonant with the admitted practice of English poetry, and that they
wantonly divest themselves of the additional charm that they might
derive from the rime usual in it. But, with true critical he
sticks in the main to the chief point—the unreason of the ob-
jection to rime, and the futility of the arguments or no-arguments
by which it had been supported. “Our understandings are not all
to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. ' 'Ill customs are
to be left,' but what have we save bare assertion to prove that
rime is an ill custom? Let the ancients have done well without it;
1 Constant to none but ever false to me,
Traitor still to love through thy faint desires.
Faith's pure shield, the Christian Diana,
England's glory crowned with all divineness,
Live long with triumphs to bless thy people
At thy sight triumphing.
3 Rose-cheeked Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
- Just beguiler,
Kindest love yet only chastest,
Royal in thy smooth denials,
Frowning or demurely smiling
Still my pure delight.
5 Follow, follow
Though with mischief.
20-2


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308
Elizabethan Criticism
is that any reason why we should be forbidden to do well with it?
Let us 'tend to perfection' by 'going on in the course we are in. '
He admits blank verse freely in drama and allows, not less freely, that
rime may be abused. But he will defend the 'sacred monuments
of English,' the ‘best power of our speech, that wherein so many
honourable spirits have sacrificed to Memory their dearest passions,
the ‘kind and natural attire of Rhyme,' which adds more grace
and hath more delight than ever bare numbers can yield. ' And
So, with no bombast or slop of rhetoric, but with that quiet
enthusiasm which is the inspiration of his own best poetry, and that
simple propriety of style which distinguishes him both in poetry
and prose, Daniel lays down, almost or quite for the first time
in English, the great principle that 'the Dorians may speak Doric,'
that each language and each literature is entitled to its own ways
and its own fashions. It is curious enough that Ascham, who, long
before, had begun by the sturdy determination to write English
matters in the English tongue for Englishmen, should, also, have
been the first to be false to this principle in the prosodic direction.
Daniel, two generations after Toxophilus, establishes the principle
in this department also.
The critical work of two of the greatest of Elizabethans, Bacon
and Ben Jonson, falls, both logically and chronologically, into other
chapters, and represents, wholly in Bacon's case, almost wholly
in Jonson's, a different and more advanced stage of criticism.