CHAPTER IV.

ENGLISH POETRY.1

INTRODUCTORY-GEORGE CHAPMAN-THE YOUNGER SPENSERIANS-PROTESTANT AND BOURGEOIS-THE FLETCHERS-BROWNE AND WITHERQUARLES, MORE, BEAUMONT, ETC.-DRUMMOND AND SIR JOHN BEAUMONT-DONNE AND JONSON-CHARACTERISTICS AND INFLUENCECAROLINE COURTLY POETRY, RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR-HERBERT, VAUGHAN, CRASHAW, AND TRAHERNE-CAREW, LOVELACE, SUCKLING, HERRICK-ANDREW MARVELL-MILTON'S LIFE AND EARLY POEMS -POETRY OF THE COMMONWEALTH WALLER AND DENHAMDAVENANT AND CHAMBERLAYNE-COWLEY-MILTON'S LATER POEMS -'PARADISE LOST'-'PARADISE REGAINED'-'SAMSON AGONISTES -CONCLUSION.

Introduction.

SPENSER found no successor able to continue his work of naturalising the Italian romantic epic, that most delightful product of the early Renaissance, into which he breathed the ethical temper of the Reformation - softened by Italian Platonism or neo-Platonism as well as the spirit of intense

1 General Histories.—It is hardly necessary to enumerate standard works like Saintsbury's Short History, &c., and Elizabethan Literature; Gosse's Seventeenth Century Studies, London, 1874; Modern English Literature, London, 1896; and Jacobean Poets, London, 1894. More recent are Courthope's History of English Poetry, vol. iii., London, 1903, to which I am much indebted though not always in agreement, and though the first sketch of my chapter had been written before the volume appeared; Chambers's Cyclopædia of

patriotism which animated Englishmen in the year of the Spanish Armada. To harmonise such diverse elements was a difficult task, and, even before Spenser's English Literature, ed. David Patrick, Edinburgh, 1901; Jusserand's Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglais, tom. ii., Paris, 1904; and Barrett Wendell's The Temper of Seventeenth-Century Literature, London, 1905. For lives and dates I have followed, generally, the Dictionary of National Biography.

Modern Editions.- Chapman's Works, London, 1875, vols. ii. and iii., with preface by Mr Swinburne, reprinted separately the same year. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Sir John Beaumont, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Marvell, were all edited by the late Dr Grosart for the privately published Fuller's Worthies Library, 1868, &c. Giles Fletcher, Herrick, and some others were issued in the same editor's Early English Poets, 1876, &c. Selections from Phineas Fletcher are contained in The Spenser of His Age, J. R. Tutin, Hull, 1905. Quarles, Dr Henry More, Dr Joseph Beaumont, were edited by Grosart in his Chertsey Worthies Library, also private. The Muses Library, London, 1893, reissued 1903, includes editions of Drummond, ed. Wm. C. Ward (who has traced many borrowings); Donne, ed. E. K. Chambers (the best text); Vaughan, ed. E. K. Chambers; Carew, ed. Arthur Vincent; Herrick, ed. Alfred Pollard ; Marvell, ed. G. A. Aitkin; and Waller, ed. G. Thorn Drury. Herbert has been frequently republished. A good text of the Temple is that of Edgar C. S. Gibson in the Library of Devotion, London, 1899; Lovelace and Suckling were edited by W. C. Hazlitt in his Library of Old Authors, London, 1856, &c. Lovelace's Lucasta has been reproduced in the Unit Library, London, 1904. Habington's Castara was edited by C. A. Elton, Bristol, n.d. [1812], and by Edward Arber, English Reprints, 1869. Randolph was edited by W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1875. Cartwright and Davenant have not been republished complete since Chalmers' British Poets, London, 1810. Denham was republished with Waller, 1857. Chamberlayne's Pharonnida has just been reissued in Saintsbury's Caroline Poets, Oxford, 1905. Of Milton's poetical works, Masson's, London, 1890, is the last complete one with annotations. Mr Beeching's, Oxford, 1900, has reproduced the original spelling. Cowley and Crashaw have been edited by A. R. Waller in the Cambridge English Classics. Traherne's poems have been published from the MS. by Bertram Dobell, London, 1903.

death, had been rendered impossible by the course of English religious and political history—as impossible as it was after the American war to preserve the early Whig identification of the cause of Britain with the cause of political liberty. Religious persecution made it difficult for the Puritan to identify his zeal for England with his zeal for Protestantism. At the same time, the essentially pagan spirit of the Italian Renaissance was not easily exorcised even by Spenser, and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm which created the Elizabethan drama, poems such as Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, and the sonnets of Shakespeare, was to the stern spirit of Puritanism simply anathema. Before the sixteenth century ended poets were beginning to form different schools, or else the two strains, the secular and the religious, run side by side in a single poet's work without his endeavouring to reconcile them in any way.

This tendency is accentuated in the early seventeenth century. This chapter deals with distinct groups or schools of poets. The patriotic note of Spenser and Shakespeare is heard only from belated Elizabethans as Drayton and Chapman. The Protestant religious poets form a group by themselves; the Catholic Anglicans another. The courtly poets, whether religious or secular, are out of touch with the nation at large, their poetry a delicate exotic. One poet, indeed, emerges with the power that genius gives to harmonise diverse elements. Milton, like Spenser, unites the spirit of the Renaissance with that of the Reformation, and both with patriotism. But he

does so only by narrowing though intensifying each, by sacrificing some of the finest elements in the noblest Elizabethan conceptions of beauty, goodness, and country. Milton's ideal of art becomes strictly, even pedantically, classical; his Protestantism is less ethical than Spenser's, and more theological; his patriotism tends to include only those Englishmen who form the chosen people of God.

Chapman.

Of the Elizabethan poets who continued to produce fresh and interesting poetry in the reign of James, if we set aside Donne and Jonson as the fountainheads of Jacobean and Caroline poetry, the two most important, Daniel and Drayton, have been included in the volume on The Later Renaissance. One veteran and rugged Elizabethan, however, deserves a word as poet as well as dramatist. Chapman's earliest volume of poems, The Shadow of Night, containing the pedantic and obscure Hymnus in Noctem and Hymnus in Cynthiam, appeared in 1594; his Ovid's Banquet of Sense-a characteristic contribution to the Venus and Adonis class of poem-with The Amorous Zodiac-a translation from the French-in 1595; and his completion of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in 1598. His great work, the translation of Homer, was begun some time before 1598, when Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homer, Prince of Poets, appeared with a dedication to the Earl of Essex. The complete Iliad appeared in 1611; the complete Odyssey in 1614; The Whole Works of Homer in 1616. The Battle of the Frogs was added later, as well as the Hymns.

Chapman comes at the head of a chapter on seventeenth-century poetry as a useful reminder that "fantastic" is not a very distinctive title to apply to the poetry of Donne and his followers,-that if conceit and far-fetched similitudes are a sign of decadence, then Elizabethan poetry was born decadent, for from first to last it is, in Arnold's phrase, "steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips." Whether we consider Chapman's original poems or his translations, his obscure, pedantic, harsh, yet always ardent and fitfully splendid hymns and complimentary verses, or the Homer which Keats has immortalised, it would be difficult to conceive a poet who, despite his classics, his eulogies of learning, and his friendship for Jonson, is more essentially "Gothic" as Addison and Thomson used the word. It is a tribute to the genius of Homer that there was so much in the Iliad and Odyssey which Chapman could translate well, or even greatly. He is at his best, it seems to me, when describing the rush of fighting, and for this, as well as other reasons, his Iliad is better than his Odyssey; but when full justice has been done to the animation of his style, its entire freedom from otiose filling-out, its not infrequent felicity and splendour of phrase, the last word on the inadequacy of Chapman's colloquialisms and conceits to reproduce the dignity and simplicity of Homer has been spoken by Matthew Arnold.1

It is difficult, in the absence of such contemporary evidence as is afforded to-day by critical reviews, to 1 On Translating Homer. Lond., 1861.