No More Learning

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.
6


## 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
6
>


## 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
6
i Soe the provious chapter.


## 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
6
6
6
6


## 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
6
1


## 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
6


## p. 304 (#326) ############################################

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.


## p. 306 (#328) ############################################

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.


## p. 307 (#329) ############################################

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


## p. 308 (#330) ############################################

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. Yet
something of what we are about to say applies to them also, and it
may be of hardly less use as a preliminary to the study of them
than as a summary and criticism of the positive results which have
been presented in historical survey by the foregoing pages.
Until the provision of increased facilities for study which has
been given during the last thirty years or so by the labours of
many scholars, there was some excuse for want of clear com-
prehension of the importance of Elizabethan criticism. But
there is no such excuse now; though it is doubtful whether,
even yet, the subject has generally received from students
the attention that it deserves. The episode-if the term may
be applied to a passage at the beginning of an action—is an
interesting, and almost entirely normal, example of the peculiar
English way of proceeding in such matters, the way which is eu-
phemistically described as that of tentative experiment, but which
has received from political plain speaking the description of 'mud-
dling through. ' After such purely preliminary attitudes to criticism
as those of Chaucer and Caxton, men, about the second quarter of the


## p. 309 (#331) ############################################

Summary
309
sixteenth century, perceive that some theory of English writing, and
some regular adjustment of practice to that theory, is advisable, if
not positively necessary; and that the advisability, if not even
the necessity, is more especially applicable to verse-writing. But,
so far as regards English itself, they have absolutely no precedent ;
they have a century of very dubious practice immediately behind
them, and hardly any knowledge of what is beyond that century,
except in regard to one very great writer, and one or two smaller
ones, who are separated from them by a great gulf in pronunciation,
vocabulary and thought. On the other hand, in the ancient
,
languages and literatures they have not merely models of practice
universally accepted as peerless, but theoretical treatises, numerous
and elaborate ; while the more accomplished modern languages,
also, offer something in precept and more in practice. It is almost
inevitable that they should do what they do do—should apply
ancient and foreign-modern principles to English without sufficient
consideration whether application is possible and desirable.
Hence, the too famous English 'heroic'; hence, the cumbering
and lumbering of the new English rhetoric with matter which may
have been not at all cumbrous or lumbering in its original place.
Hence, the ready adoption of the interesting, but, to a great extent,
irrelevant and otiose, discussions about the abstract virtue of
poetry. Hence, the undue haste to teach the infant, or hardly
adolescent, drama the way it should go, without waiting to see
what would come of the way in which it was going.
It was a partial misfortune-but partial only because the
efforts made were far better than none at all that the chief and
most abundant modern critical treatises available were either
mere echoes of the classics or devoted to a modern language-
Italian—which has but small affinities with English. The Spanish
critics began just too late to give much assistance, even had
English writers been disposed to take lessons from Spain; and, in
their own country, their voices were soon whelmed. The French
required very careful reading not to do more harm than good.
And, above all, behind the whole of at least poetical, and especially
prosodic, criticism, there was easily perceivable, though, perhaps,
not consciously perceived, the dread of relapse into doggerel—the
aspiration after order, civility, accomplishment, as contrasted with
'barbarous and balductoom' vernacularity. And, outside the
strictly literary sphere, numerous influences determined or affected
some, at least, of the issues of criticism : the puritan distrust of
poetry and, specially, of the stage; the Anglican dislike of possible
2


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310
Elizabethan Criticism
6
Roman influences in foreign literature, the contempt of the whole
period for medieval things.
Yet it is remarkable how, from the very first and throughout,
there is a glimmering sense that, after all, English must 'do for
itself'--that 'the kingdom is within,' here as elsewhere. In the
act of abusing rime and recommending' verse,' Ascham admits more
than a misgiving as to whether the English hexameter is possible. In
the act of limiting English poetry as a matter of actual observation
to dissyllabic feet, Gascoigne is careful to remark that we have
had' others, and, apparently, rather wishes that we may have
them again; while it is remarkable how directly he goes to the
positive material of actual poetry for the source of his rules.
Sidney, classiciser as he is, practically assures us, by that famous
confession as to Chevy Chace, that we need be under no apprehen-
sion but that English verse will always appeal to the Englishman
as no other can. A rather sapless formalist like Puttenham does
adopt, and with not so very scanty knowledge, that historical
method in which all salvation lies ; and so, in his more blundering
way, does even an enthusiast for innovation like Webbe. Finally,
we find Daniel striking into and striking out in the full stream of
truth. "We shall best tend to perfection by going on in the
course we are in. ' Tu contra audentior ito!
Yet, at the same time, the critical literature of the period not less
distinctly avoids the mistake, too well known elsewhere, of neglecting
the comparative study of other languages and literatures, ancient
as well as modern. Indeed, half the mistakes that it does make may
be said to come from overdoing this comparison. At the particular
stage, however, this mattered very little. It was, undoubtedly, up
to this period, a defect of English that, though constantly trans-
lating and imitating, it had translated and imitated, if not quite
unintelligently, yet with no conscious and critical intelligence
in a blind and instinctive sort of way. This is now altered.
Sidney's not daring to allow Spenser’s ‘framing of his style to an
olde rusticke language . . . since neither Theocritus . . . Virgill . . .
nor Sanazara . . . did affect it,' is, indeed, altogether wrong. It is
wrong, as a matter of fact, to some extent, as regards Theocritus ;
it is inconsistent as ranking a mere modern like Sanazzaro, of
certainly no more authority than Spenser himself, with Theocritus
and Vergil; and it is a petitio principii in its assumption that
Greeks, or Latins, or Italians, can serve as prohibitory precedents
-as forbidders, merely by the fact of not having done a thing-
to Englishmen. But the process is literary and critical, if the


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Summary
311
procedure and application are erroneous. English, so to speak,
is, at least, 'entered in the general academy of literatures ; it
submits itself to competition and to co-examination; it is no
longer content to go on-not, indeed, as Ascham vainly says, 'in
a foul wrong way' but—in an uncultivated and thoughtless way.
It is taking stock and making audit of itself, investigating what
has been done and prospecting for what is to be done. Nor
should it be forgotten that there is such work as Mulcaster's, which,
though not strictly literary criticism, is linguistic and scholastic
criticism of no unliterary kind. Mulcaster', in his Positions and
Elementary, following Thynne and others, almost founds the
examination of the language itself; as does that part of Ascham's
Scholemaster which has hitherto been passed over and which
concerns the teaching of the classical tongue by means of English-
a process which, as all sound thinking on education has seen since,
involves, and carries with it, the teaching of English by means of
the classical tongues. The whole body of effort in this kind is one
great overhauling of the literary and linguistic resources of the
nation—a thing urgently required, long neglected, yet, perhaps,
not possible to have been attempted with any real prospect of
benefit until this particular time.
Nor would it be wise to over-estimate the futility of the
futilities, the mistake of the mistakes, that were committed. The
worst and most prominent of them all—the craze for 'versing'-
sprang from a just sense of the disorderliness of much recent
English poetry, and led almost directly to the introduction of a
new and better order. As for what may seem to us the idle
expatiations on the virtues of poetry in the abstract, or the super-
fluous defences of it, these were things which, according to all
precedent, had to be gone through, and to be got over. Even on
the side where there was still most to seek—the diligent and
complete exploring of the actual possessions of English in a really
historical spirit-more must have been done than is obvious on the
surface, or we should not be able to find, a few years after Elizabeth's
death, a man like William Browne acquainted with the poems of
Occleve, who had never been favoured by the early printers, and
actually reproducing Occleve's work among his own. That there was
even some study of Old English is well known. On the whole, there,
fore, though these various efforts were not well co-ordinated, and, in
many cases, not even well directed to their immediate objects, it
would be the grossest oï errors to belittle or misprise them; and
i See also chap. xix.


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312
Elizabethan Criticism
it is only a pity that the taste for critical enquiry was not better
represented in the first two generations of the seventeenth-century
itself. For, in that case, Dryden, who actually availed himself of
what he could get from Jonson, would have found far more to go
upon; and, with his own openness of mind and catholicity of
appreciation, would have done even more than he did to keep his
successors in turn from falling into that pit of ignorant contempt
for older literature which engulfed too many of them. Even as it
was, the Elizabethan critics did something to give pause to the
hasty generalisation that periods of criticism and periods of creation
cannot coincide.